Most recent papers:

• Lost futures and “starting from zero”: Affective experiences of downward social mobility among refugees and asylum seekers in Spain.
  Jacqueline Wagner.
  Ethos. March 23, 2026
  ["Ethos, Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2026. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article examines how refugees and asylum seekers from the upper and upper‐middle classes in their countries of origin contended with the prospect of downward social mobility in Madrid, Spain. Notably, downward social mobility involved losing not only material resources but also social status, opportunities, and imagined futures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an official refugee and asylum seeker reception center in Madrid, I argue that this process of coming to terms with their new socioeconomic positions represents an experience distinct from acculturation or integration, and I assert that it comes with its own unique set of affective experiences, including feelings of distress, injured pride, threats to identity, and disruption to existing life plans. Furthermore, the pace of downward mobility impacted the dynamics of loss for refugees and asylum seekers. This has implications for broader psychological anthropological examinations of how people grapple with change and upheaval in their lives.\n"]

  March 23, 2026   doi: 10.1111/etho.70026   open full text
• Open wounds: Further proof that the detained‐disappeared existed in this world.
  Kiyoshi Nakaoji.
  Ethos. March 23, 2026
  ["Ethos, Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2026. ", "\nAbstract\nThis theoretical and ethnographic paper examines how the finding of accurate reports about what happened to the detained‐disappeared supports the psychological stability of the families of the missing. Drawing on a number of Winnicott's theories (the transitional object, transitional phenomena, and a sense of aliveness), alongside my field research in Chile, I will consider how the absence of a corpse, a death without ritual, and a mourning process without cultural support has affected the families of the detained‐disappeared. Furthermore, I will contemplate how receiving an accurate report of events has helped families to come to terms with their loss. I hypothesize that texts can have the function of a transitional object in the process of recognizing the death of loved one. If the truth can be substituted by the written word, the void left by the disappearance has the chance to be filled. In this study, fieldwork was conducted at the Association of Families of the Detained‐Disappeared in Santiago, through which 52 families were interviewed. Research was also undertaken in Parral where the German colony Colonia Dignidad has had a strong influence on the community since its creation in 1961 to the present day.\n\nRésumé\nCet article théorique et ethnographique analyse comment l'accès à des rapports fiables sur le sort des détenus‐disparus soutient la stabilité psychologique de leurs familles. En mobilisant les notions winnicottiennes d'objet transitionnel, de phénomènes transitionnels et de sentiment de vitalité, ainsi que mes recherches de terrain au Chili, j'examine comment l'absence de dépouille, de rituel mortuaire et de cadres culturels de deuil a entravé la reconnaissance de la mort. Je montre que la réception d'un rapport précis peut aider les familles à affronter la perte. J'avance que certains textes fonctionnent comme objets transitionnels : lorsqu'ils parviennent à offrir une forme de vérité accessible, ils créent une présence symbolique capable de combler le vide laissé par la disparition. L’étude repose sur cinquante‐deux entretiens menés à l'Association des Familles des Détenus‐Disparus à Santiago, ainsi que sur une enquête à Parral, marquée par l'influence persistante de la Colonia Dignidad depuis 1961.\n\nAbstrakt\nDiese theoretische und ethnografische Studie untersucht, wie der Zugang zu verlässlichen Berichten über das Schicksal der inhaftierten Verschwundenen die psychische Stabilität ihrer Familien unterstützt. Unter Rückgriff auf Winnicotts Konzepte des Übergangsobjekts, der Übergangsphänomene und des Vitalitätsgefühls sowie auf meine Feldforschung in Chile analysiere ich, wie das Fehlen eines Körpers, eines Rituals und kultureller Trauerrahmen die Anerkennung des Todes erschwert hat. Zugleich zeige ich, wie präzise Berichte den Familien helfen, den Verlust zu verarbeiten. Ich argumentiere, dass Texte als Übergangsobjekte fungieren können: Wenn das geschriebene Wort eine zugängliche Form von Wahrheit bietet, kann es die durch das Verschwinden entstandene Leere symbolisch füllen. Die Studie basiert auf zweiundfünfzig Interviews bei der Vereinigung der Familien der Inhaftierten Verschwundenen in Santiago sowie auf Recherchen in Parral, das seit 1961 von der Colonia Dignidad geprägt ist.\n"]

  March 23, 2026   doi: 10.1111/etho.70031   open full text
• Learning not to help in Nanjing and London–Cultural elaboration of empathy in childhood.
  Anni Kajanus.
  Ethos. March 23, 2026
  ["Ethos, Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2026. ", "\nAbstract\nHelping is one of the key features of human sociality. The ethnographic record is pervaded by accounts of people doing things with and for each other from an early age. Developmental psychology has shown that by the time children begin to walk and talk, they already display helpful behavior in many situations. These findings suggest that the propensity to help is biologically based, rather than directly taught. While doing research on children's cooperation in Nanjing, China, and London, UK, it became clear to me that school‐aged children were socialized into not helping, rather than helping. This raises the question: what are some of the cultural and psychological processes shaping this core human behavior? To address this, I bring together three levels of culturally grounded analysis: helping behaviors, the cognition of empathy, and its emotional underpinnings. Drawing on cultural ontologies of personhood, I show that in London, children are expected to be generally helpful, but not at a great cost to themselves, while in Nanjing, there is less emphasis on general helpfulness, but highly costly helping is expected in particular relationships.\n"]

  March 23, 2026   doi: 10.1111/etho.70027   open full text
• Issue Information ‐ TOC.
  
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 297-297, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12187   open full text
• A Diagram for Fire. Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement. Jon Bialecki. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2017. 263 pp.
  Peter Stromberg.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page e4-e6, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12209   open full text
• “The Inimba It Cuts”: A Reconsideration of Mother Love in the Context of Poverty.
  Sarah E. Rubin.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract Considerations of motherhood in contexts of poverty often explore how material scarcity transforms or degrades women's capacity to love or nurture their children. In this article, I focus on Xhosa mothers who live in the extreme poverty of an urban township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, and how they struggle with the decision to send their children to be raised by other mother‐figures. My argument reveals that the Xhosa idiom inimba offers three models for mother love, but poverty exacerbates the contradictions between the models and intensifies the moral dilemma of sending. I demonstrate how, for these Xhosa township mothers, poverty intersects with mother love in unexpected ways whereby the model itself is not remade or profoundly transformed, rather the moral stakes seem higher for the mothers who perceive mother love as crucial to their children's well‐being and integral to their selfhood as good mothers. In developing this argument, I aim to further our understandings of poverty and the complex ways that they intersect and interact with cultural models and practice. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 330-350, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12210   open full text
• Memory Fields.
  Daniel T. Linger.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract George Orwell's novel 1984 raises a key question in the politics of memory: how far can the nation‐state reach into minds and reshape personal memories? Addressing it requires a theoretical framework that can encompass public and personal representations of the past. I develop the concept memory field, defined as the set of public and personal memories associated with a putatively past event, object, or situation. The memory field associated with the Kent State University massacre of May 4, 1970 exemplifies the diversity of memory, its constructed nature, its political uses, its brute qualities, and its implications for identities. I compare several additional cases drawn from the ethnographic and historical literatures, assessing the impact of the state's memory‐control tactics on personal memories. I close with a reflection on the emergent politics of memory in Donald Trump's United States. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 373-396, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12208   open full text
• Introduction: Person‐Centered Approaches in the Study of Culture and Poverty.
  Edward D. Lowe, Claudia Strauss.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract This introduction to a special collection of articles on the theme of poverty and personhood provides an overview of the collection's response to recent calls for a reconsideration of culture in urban poverty studies. We argue that such a reconsideration must confront two theoretical problems if it is to be successful. First, the analyses must make a sustained effort to define clearly the theoretical model of “culture” used in the analyses and why this theoretical perspective is illuminative without reproducing the problematic uses of culture in past scholarship. Second, this reconsideration must come to terms with the problematic relationship between culture and human subjectivities. The remainder of the article describes how this special collection addresses these two concerns by bringing together recent innovations in person‐centered ethnography that draws considerably from psychodynamic theory, phenomenology, and a theory from cognitive anthropology that replaces bounded cultures with variably distributed, affectively imbued cultural models. Cultural models also include expectations about others’ judgments. This introductory article concludes by highlighting four contributions the accompanying research articles make as a collection to the question of how we might better understand the relation of culture and human subjectivity in the study of urban poverty. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 299-310, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12206   open full text
• “Whatever I Have to Do That's Right:” Culture and the Precariousness of Personhood in a Poor Urban Neighborhood.
  Edward D. Lowe.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract This article presents a person‐centered case study of one woman's struggles to realize a meaningful sense of personhood in a low‐income urban neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An analysis of longitudinal ethnographic data for this case reveals how everyday aspirations toward a morally resonant lived‐sense of personhood were informed by a core assemblage of three cultural models: “providing” and “being there” as a parent and doing so within a framework of “defensive individualism.” This assemblage of cultural models was particularly compelling because of a combination of the embodied residue of childhood experiences and moments of “moral breakdown” in adult life. The experiences of moral breakdown were particularly meaningful because recurrent episodes of material hardship constantly threatening to upend past efforts to realize a meaningful sense of personhood in everyday life, in turn, generated a constant effort to reclaim and repair the symbolic markers of an achieved personhood that had been lost. These observations point to a precariousness of personhood that seemed to further motivate an investment in a self‐definition in terms of this combination of cultural models. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 311-329, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12205   open full text
• “It Feels So Alien” or the Same Old S—: Attachment to Divergent Cultural Models in Insecure Times.
  Claudia Strauss.
  Ethos. September 05, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract Instead of conceptualizing poor people as a group with a fixed culture, we need to understand diverse, shared frameworks for responding to economic adversity. Over half of all Americans of working age can expect to be in a poor or near‐poor household at some point. Differing interpretations of their low incomes under flexible capitalism are illustrated by the responses of two unemployed middle‐aged sisters from a white working‐class family in now poverty‐stricken San Bernardino County, California. Their divergent interpretations (one blamed herself and fell into depression; the other did not) show that even members of the same subgroup can draw upon different personally compelling cultural models to navigate social and individual change. This person‐centered multiple‐cultural‐models approach is needed as a corrective both to portrayals of culture as a stable group adaptation to an unchanging economic situation and to theories of persons as buffeted by economic shifts without guiding narratives. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 351-372, September 2018.
  

  September 05, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12204   open full text
• Mind, Body, Brain, and the Conditions of Meaning.
  Rebecca Seligman.
  Ethos. September 04, 2018
  --- - |2 Abstract This article explores the relationship between meaning and the body, and the role of mind and brain in mediating this relationship. Drawing on research on “grounded cognition” in cognitive neuropsychology, I consider the mechanisms through which meanings become embodied. I illustrate my argument using examples of the ways in which meaning conditions experiences of illness and health. Focusing especially on the example of religious healing through spirit possession, I explore how the state of one's body can be “conditioned” by meaning, and in turn, how the condition of one's body may affect cognitive processes of meaning making. In doing so, this article aims not only to inform anthropological understandings of embodiment, but also the way we think about cognition, knowledge, and meaning. [Embodiment, brain, grounded cognition, spirit possession, religious healing] Abstrait Cet article explore la relation entre sens et corps, et le rôle de l'esprit et du cerveau dans la médiation entre les deux. En m'appuyant sur la recherche en « cognition ancrée » (grounded cognition) en neuropsychologie, je considère les mécanismes à travers lesquels le sens fait l'objet d'une inscription corporelle. J'illustre mon argument par des exemples sur la manière dont le sens conditionne les expériences de maladie et de santé. En me focalisant notamment sur le cas de la guérison religieuse à travers la possession spirituelle, j'explore comment un état physiologique peut être « conditionné» par le sens, et inversement, comment un état physiologique peut affecter des processus cognitifs de construction de sens. Ce faisant, cet article vise non seulement à éclairer notre compréhension anthropologique de la corporalité, mais aussi nos conceptions de la cognition, de la connaissance, et du sens. - Ethos, Volume 46, Issue 3, Page 397-417, September 2018.
  

  September 04, 2018   doi: 10.1111/etho.12207   open full text
• Care and Relatedness among Rural Mapuche Women: Issues of Cariño and Empathy.
  Marjorie Murray, Sofía Bowen, Marisol Verdugo, Jona Holtmannspötter.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Araucanía region of Chile, this article analyzes the caring practices of rural Mapuche women through relatedness, investigating how the study of mutual care illuminates the acknowledgment of sociality and personhood. Recounting concrete daily practices of mutual care—ayuda (help), estar atenta(being aware), and estar ahí (being there)—we examine the enactment and narratives of what these women label cariño, or affection. We argue that these women's caring practices and sense of cariño are coherent with the acknowledged volitional and autonomic features of Mapuche personhood. We also claim that paying specific attention to cariño provides novel insight for an understanding of rural Mapuche women's personhood. Cariño stands for what is considered empathy in different societies, in which feelings and actions related to empathy and empathy‐like phenomena are indistinguishable. We hope to contribute to the study of mutual care in everyday life.  [care, women, Mapuche, autonomy, empathy] Basándose en trabajo de campo etnográfico en la Región de la Araucanía en Chile, este artículo analiza las prácticas de cuidado de mujeres Mapuche, investigando cómo el estudio del cuidado mutuo ilumina el conocimiento de la socialidad y el ser‐persona. Profundizando en prácticas cotidianas de cuidado mutuo –ayuda, estar alerta y estar ahí‐ examinamos acciones y narrativas de lo que estas mujeres denominan cariño o afecto. Argumentamos que las prácticas de cuidado de estas mujeres y su sentido de cariño son coherentes con aspectos volitivos y de autonomía de la persona Mapuche. También afirmamos que prestar atención al cariño proporciona una visión novedosa para comprender el ser‐persona de las mujeres Mapuche rurales. Cariño corresponde a lo que distintas sociedades consideran empatía, en las que sentimientos y acciones relativas a la empatía y fenómenos de tipo empático son indistinguibles. Esperamos contribuir al estudio del cuidado mutuo en la vida cotidiana.  [Palabras clave: cuidados, mujeres, Mapuche, autonomía, empatía] Auf Basis einer ethnographischen Feldforschung in der Araucanía‐Region Chiles untersucht dieser Artikel Fürsorgepraktiken von ländlich lebenden Mapuche‐Frauen als eine Form von Verbundenheit und beleuchtet damit die Frage, wie diese Praktiken zur Bestätigung von Sozialität und Personsein beitragen. Anhand von konkreten alltäglichen Fürsorgepraktiken wie ayuda (Hilfe), estar alerta (Aufmerksamsein), estar ahí (da sein) beschreiben wir die Performanz und die Narrative dessen, was diese Frauen als cariño oder Zuneigung bezeichnen. Wir argumentieren, dass die Fürsorgepraktiken dieser Frauen und ihr Verständnis von cariño mit volitionalen und autonomen Aspekten des Personseins bei den Mapuche verknüpft sind. Die Fokussierung von cariño bietet einen neuen Einblick in das Personsein ruraler Mapuche‐Frauen und führt zu einem, auch in anderen Gesellschaften verbreiteten, Verständnis von Empathie, wonach die damit verbundenen Gefühle und Handlungen nicht zu trennen sind. Diese Studie soll zu bisherigen Kenntnissen gegenseitiger Fürsorgepraktiken im alltäglichen Leben beitragen.  [Schlüsselbegriffe: Fürsorge, Frauen, Mapuche, Autonomie, Empathie]

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12171   open full text
• Chinese Individualisms: Childrearing Aspirations for the Next Generation of Middle‐Class Chinese Citizens.
  Sung won Kim, Kari‐Elle Brown, Vanessa L. Fong.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  This article draws on surveys (N = 406) and interviews (n = 48) of graduates of a middle school in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China, who were part of the first generation of children born under the one‐child policy that began along with China's economic reforms in 1979 and were between ages 25 and 30 when they were interviewed in 2011–14. We compared how they said they had been raised by their parents with how they hope to raise their own children. We found that, while their parents raised them with the disciplined study habits and high expectations children needed to become successful in the newly competitive education system of the 1990s, our interviewees had developed a new understanding of what it would take for children to become successful, upwardly mobile Chinese citizens in the 2010s, and emphasized freedom and the development and pursuit of individual interests, pointing towards a hybrid form of “soft” and “hard” individualism.

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12168   open full text
• Specters of Social Antagonism: The Cultural Psychodynamics of Dream Aggression among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas, Mexico).
  Kevin P. Groark.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  In this article, I present an analysis of “persecution dreams” among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula, discussing the complex connections among sickness, interpersonal aggression, ideologies of social antagonism, and the spectral phantasies that shadow these social phenomena. Building on this ethnographic foundation, I present a “cultural psychodynamic” account framed in terms of projective‐introjective dynamics (functioning at both the individual and social levels), arguing that the aggression dream serves as an experience structure in which inner and outer realities become deeply interwoven—often resulting in an increased sense of insecurity and existential threat. At its broadest level, this article is concerned with the affective dimensions of dream life, the processing of real affects and social relations within the register of phantasy, and the transposition of these phantasy‐laden feelings back into waking life, where they influence not only the individual's sense of well‐being, but the tenor of actual interpersonal relations.

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12174   open full text
• “At Such a Good School, Everybody Needs It”: Contested Meanings of Prescription Stimulant Use in College Academics.
  Amy Cooper, Lisa McGee.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  Approximately 15% of US college students have used Adderall or other stimulant medications without a prescription or not as prescribed. The development of college academics into a field of practice amenable to unauthorized pharmaceutical intervention suggests a growing acceptance of pharmaceutical self‐fashioning among young people in the United States. However, analyzing illicit stimulant use from college students’ perspectives, we documented significant contestation over the practice's acceptability. For some, unauthorized stimulant use violated the rules of fair play, but for others it was an understandable strategy to gain an edge and maximize one's “return on investment.” Viewing college academics in market‐oriented terms encouraged students to understand illicit stimulant use as an expectable (if not always morally acceptable) strategy for managing the competition of college life and a postrecession job market. This analysis shows how the moral valence of unauthorized stimulant use is strongly shaped by the sociocultural context that shapes people's realities.

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12167   open full text
• Leaving Family to Return to Family: Roots Migration Among Second‐Generation Italian‐Australians.
  Emanuela Sala, Loretta Baldassar.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  This article examines “roots migration” (visits and repatriations) of second‐generation Italian‐Australians to their ancestral homeland. Despite the current economic climate, these young adults have moved to Italy, hence their motivation for migration goes beyond economic drivers and is best explained by psychosocial factors. Drawing on ethnographic analysis, our aim is to highlight the importance of the dimension of the family, which has tended to be implicitly rather than explicitly studied, within the transnational social field and imaginary. Family is a somewhat contradictory factor that generates ties to the ancestral homeland, leading us to apply a psychosocial approach comprising an analysis of affective and relational dimensions through the lens of familial habitus. Our findings highlight how family is the major motivation for roots migration involving an interconnected process of moving away from (the migrant) family and of moving to (the homeland) family as a culturally appropriate way of gaining independence.

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12173   open full text
• Suffering and Tears: Authenticity and Student Volunteerism in Postreform China.
  Chun‐Yi Sum.
  Ethos. September 07, 2017
  This article examines a conundrum in my ethnographic fieldwork with Chinese university students who volunteered in service trips to rural communities: why did participants volunteer to suffer and to cry? This article explains students’ quest for hardship and tears in relation to emerging desires for authenticity in China. It discusses how the political state and student volunteers co‐constructed the peculiar expressions of these desires. As authentic emotions came to the forefront in students’ understanding of meaningful engagement, they diluted the political connotation of volunteerism and consequently undermined the state's moral authority as the “lead volunteer.” This created the room for students to align the definition of responsible citizenship with authentic commitment and youthful innocence. Delineating the paradoxes and obstacles that volunteers encountered in their quests, this article problematizes the potential and limits of authenticity in transforming the foundations of sociability and moral leadership in postreform China. 本文通过大学生对情绪表达的追求分析志愿活动在中国的冒起。作者跟随大学生往赴农村「支教」, 发现志愿者都渴慕最苦最累的体验, 以及由心而发的泪水。这些追求反映了年轻人对社会上种种造假和功利主义的不满。志愿者以汗水和泪水明志, 宣告自己参与志愿工作不为名利报酬, 只为满腔热诚所使。这种热血主导的志愿精神对参与者的道德观带来什么冲击, 如何造就年轻人对社会状况的反思? [Authenticity, Emotion, Youth, Volunteerism, China]

  September 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12172   open full text
• Social Contagion and Cultural Epidemics: Phenomenological and “Experience‐Near” Explorations.
  Lone Grøn, Lotte Meinert.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  We open the special issue by asking: how are groups of people affected by similar conditions, even when these are not biologically contagious? This is linked to broader theoretical and empirical questions of how we are influenced by others and by the specific times and places in which we live. We describe the history and etymology of the concepts of epidemics and contagion and argue that we need to reclaim some of the pre‐Hippocratic meanings of these concepts. Importantly, we suggest a postponement, or epoche, of the negative moral judgment of these terms with a view to exploring what actually happens when noncommunicable diseases and conditions spread. We introduce a variety of existing approaches and argue that they have taken us only part of the way in trying to understand social contagion and cultural epidemics. The articles in this issue explore a variety of noncommunicable conditions that have gained global prominence as epidemic problems—diabetes, obesity, trauma, and autism—through perspectives and concepts from phenomenological and experience‐near traditions. This includes emic ideas of social contagion and contamination, intersubjective units of analysis, causal indeterminacy, as well as diversity and transformation in social contagion.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12160   open full text
• The Weight of the Family: Communicability as Alien Affection in Danish Family Histories and Experiences of Obesity.
  Lone Grøn.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  Can we think of something like communicability or contagion in relation to diseases and conditions that have hitherto been categorized as noncommunicable? In this article, I take my ethnographic point of departure in the lifelong—and transgenerational—experiences of obesity, weight gain, and weight loss of four Danish families in order to show how kinship, relatedness, and dwellings emerge as simultaneously homey and alien contagious connections, when exploring communicability in the context of what is often referred to as “the obesity epidemic.” Analytically, I am inspired by the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels’ (2007, 2011a) phenomenology of the alien, and through an analysis of the tracing of the spread of obesity to kinship ties, Danish hygge and the places and times in which we live, I propose the notion of affection as a phenomenologically grounded theory of social contagion.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12159   open full text
• Despairing Moods: Worldly Attunements and Permeable Personhood in Yap.
  C. Jason Throop.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  Building upon ongoing efforts to further a phenomenological anthropological engagement with affective and mooded dimensions of moral experience, the article examines the ways in which everyday moods may disclose forms of attunement to worldly conditions. The article focuses specifically upon the mood‐inflected concerns of a Yapese woman suffering from type II diabetes named “Thiil” who despairs of the possibility that her children will eventually become afflicted with the disease as well. A central goal of the article is to explore the ways in which Thiil's mood‐inflected responses to her illness disclose an attunement to the “communicable” pathways of an otherwise “noncommunicable” disease.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12163   open full text
• Dreamscapes of Intimacy and Isolation: Shadows of Contagion and Immunity.
  Douglas Hollan.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  In this article, I use the study of selfscape dreams to discuss contagion‐like processes not as unique or extraordinary phenomena per se, but rather as a particular kind of social influence more broadly conceived. In particular, I argue that dream consciousness gives us clues about how social influence (and contagion) actually works: partially, incrementally, in a “condensed” way, through a variety of sensory and perceptual modalities, contingent on and delimited by the emotional memories of those involved, but with the potential of exceeding those contingencies and limitations by the ability of all of the participants to imaginatively elaborate upon what is experienced and communicated. I compare and contrast how and why two men from two very different parts of the world dream of their deceased parents. I use the dreams to illustrate how people come to inhabit, experience, and become influenced by their social and cultural worlds in the particular way they do and also to demonstrate how dream experience may be implicated in everyday behavior.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12166   open full text
• A Phenomenological Approach to the Cultivation of Expertise: Emergent Understandings of Autism.
  Mary C. Lawlor, Olga Solomon.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  In this article, we draw on narrative phenomenological (Mattingly 2010) and ethnographic projects to investigate how phenomenology may contribute to understanding how practical, experientially gained, expertise is cultivated in extraordinary circumstances. The lived world of autism provides a compelling context for such an exploration. Drawing on ethnographic data, we present arguments related to how a phenomenological approach to understanding autism can be productive by examining the cultivation of expertise and the contagion of knowledge and understanding. Family expertise that is grounded in lived experience often reveals the limitations of both public knowledge and scientific evidence and is generative of a kind of practical knowledge that warrants diffusion. Consideration is given to the specific contributions of a phenomenological approach to understanding autism and learning in collective engagements. Contagion as both a facilitative and positive phenomenon and a potentially stressful or harmful development is discussed.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12162   open full text
• Autism and The Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation Into the Contagion of Nothing.
  Cheryl Mattingly.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  This article investigates the social contagion of autism from a phenomenological perspective. It asks: Can a phenomenological approach, rather than merely illustrating the typologies revealed by constructionist and political economic approaches, generate new categories because it insists on a different unit of analysis rooted in a first‐person perspective? To answer this, the article contrasts a third‐person account of autism as an epidemic of representation and a phenomenological account. Drawing upon philosophical phenomenology (Gadamer in particular), it broadly outlines what is at stake in the phenomenological insistence on the primacy of the first‐person perspective. Turning to an ethnographic case, it examines how the category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as it is lived by one family, poses a threat far more pernicious than a third‐person exploration of ASD might suggest. As a lived experience, it becomes linked to other epidemics and life conditions, emerging as the ominous category “becoming nothing.”

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12164   open full text
• “These Things Continue”: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda.
  Lotte Meinert, Susan Reynolds Whyte.
  Ethos. June 02, 2017
  After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war is over, but people say that “these things continue.” In this article, we follow the case of one family and explore the social contagion and contamination of “these things.” We relate Acholi ideas of cen, the spirits of the vengeful dead, to Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and phenomenological conceptions of violence and “the alien” in human experience.

  June 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12161   open full text
• Citizens‐in‐Waiting, Deportees‐in‐Waiting: Power, Temporality, and Suffering in the U.S. Asylum System.
  Bridget M. Haas.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  This article explores how the interrelationship of power and temporality shapes the lived experiences and subjectivities of political asylum claimants in the United States. By lodging an asylum claim, migrants enter into a system that will, in effect, produce them as legitimate refugees deserving of protection or as illegitimate, “bogus” asylum seekers in need of expulsion. In this way, asylum claimants inhabit a dual positionality of citizen‐in‐waiting/deportee‐in‐waiting, as they often spend many years waiting for the adjudication of their cases. This article ethnographically analyzes how this dual positionality is inhabited by asylum claimants, producing novel forms of suffering and being‐in‐the‐world. More specifically, I argue that the asylum process evokes a sense of “existential limbo”: a subjective and temporal state of being in which the asylum system, in the present moment, is understood as the locus of suffering and in which life and meaning making are defined by a sense of immobility.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12150   open full text
• Forbidden Signs: Deafness and Language Socialization in Mexico City.
  Anne E. Pfister.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  Language socialization, the simultaneous process of learning language and culture, occurs spontaneously in most families. However, deaf children born to hearing parents cannot fully access the spoken languages of their families and hearing society. This study provides data illustrating that Mexico's therapeutic approach to language does not constitute language socialization for deaf children; simultaneously, it affirms that signing communities offer sites where deaf people can actively engage in this critical process. Mexican families with deaf children and deaf adults from the same community reflect upon their oralist upbringings and (1) depict the consequences of the therapeutic approach to language for Mexican deaf people and (2) illustrate how strictly oralist approaches did not constitute language socialization, and in fact, served to constrain these processes in ways that often came at a great linguistic, emotional, and educational cost to participants. La socialización del lenguaje es un proceso simultáneo del aprendizaje del lenguaje y de la cultura, y ocurre espontáneamente en la mayoría de las familias. Sin embargo, los niños sordos que nacen a papás oyentes no pueden acceder completamente a los idiomas hablados de sus familias y de la sociedad oyente. Este studio de investigación proporciona datos que ilustran como el enfoque terapéutico mexicano del lenguaje no es igual a la socialización del lenguaje para los niños sordos. Simultáneamente, afirma que las comunidades donde se utiliza la lengua de señas ofrecen oportunidades y espacios para que gente sorda pueda participar activamente en el proceso crítico de la socialización del lenguaje. Las familias mexicanas con niños sordos y adultos sordos de la misma comunidad reflexionan sobre sus creencias oralistas y (1) representan las consecuencias del enfoque terapéutico del lenguaje para la gente sorda de México e (2) ilustran como un enfoque estrictamente oralista no constituye la socialización del lenguaje, y de hecho, sirve para constreñir estos procesos de tal forma que se producen daños en términos lingüísticos, emocionales, y educacionales para los participantes.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12151   open full text
• Agency and the GED: Personae and Artifacts in the Figured World of a Literacy Welcome Center.
  Chaise LaDousa, Ana Baldrige.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  The GED test has served as a mechanism for granting high school equivalency in the United States for decades, and some states have funded tutorial services because they have imagined the GED to be a means for getting a job or increasing one's wages. Based on field research conducted in literacy welcome centers in a small city in Upstate New York, we argue that teachers’ and students’ discursive reflections show that they attain agency in multiple ways during participation in tutorials. On the one hand, students build and hone their skills required for successful testing. On the other hand, teachers embody the caring disposition that the world inhabited by the students lacks. We argue that the GED and its practice exams are artifacts that only partly account for the agency of teachers and students, and, when reflected on by an administrator, erase crucial aspects of that agency.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12157   open full text
• “The Goal Is Not to Cheer You Up”: Empathetic Care in Israeli Life Coaching.
  Tamar Kaneh‐Shalit.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  This article presents the controversial role of emotions in projects of self‐realization through the particular practice of empathetic caring. Israeli life coaches claim to allow minimal space for trainees’ emotions: they teach them to master self‐steering through a calculative reflexivity that also aims to limit affect. At the same time, they engage with their trainees’ feelings by invoking emotional reactions only to argue against their trainees’ subjective experiences. The article traces this mixture of “emotion‐free” empathy and authoritative neoliberal technologies of the self to a culturally specific Israeli notion of care which is grounded in an egalitarian ethos. I therefore showed that Israeli coaching produces a unique vernacular version of neoliberal selfhood, one infused with tensions between seemingly incompatible attitudes: self‐reflection and authoritarian assertions and a type of empathetic concern that is centered on the caregiver's assessment rather than the feelings of those being cared for.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12155   open full text
• Being Part of the Nação: Examining Costly Religious Rituals in a Brazilian Neo‐Pentecostal Church.
  H.J. François Dengah.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  Neo‐Pentecostalism is notable for its emphasis on “prosperity theology,” the belief that economic prosperity is available to the faithful. Members give monetary offerings in exchange for later blessings of financial prosperity. Despite the faith's rapid growth worldwide, the influence of prosperity theology on believers’ lives is still being understood. This mixed‐method study examines Brazilian neo‐Pentecostal rituals through the dual paradigms of religious signaling and cognitive dissonance theory. Signaling theory posits that costly behaviors, such as giving significant sums of money, are honest signs of an individual's intent toward group cooperation. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that individuals will justify the costly signals required by overvaluing membership in the group. The integration of these two approaches provides a comprehensive model for costly ritual participation by addressing both social and individual motivating factors. This study furthers our understanding of neo‐Pentecostalism by examining how prosperity theology rituals influence behaviors, cognitions, and the psychological well‐being. Neopentecostalismo é notável por sua ênfase na “teologia da prosperidade,” a crença de que a prosperidade econômica está disponível para os fiéis. Os membros dão ofertas monetárias em troca de bênçãos financeiras. Este estudo de método misto examina os rituais neopentecostais através de dois paradigmas: sinalização custosa e dissonância cognitiva. A teoria da sinalização custosa postula que os comportamentos caros, tais como dar somas significativas de dinheiro, são sinais honestos de intenções para a cooperação e participação dentro do grupo. A teoria da dissonância cognitiva sugere que as pessoas vão justificar os sinais caros exigidos pela supervalorização no grupo. A integração dessas duas abordagens oferece um modelo mais abrangente para a participação nos rituais, abordando ambos os fatores sociais e individuais de motivação. Este estudo possibilita a compreensão do evangelho da prosperidade, examinando como seu ritual influencia comportamentos, cognições e o bem‐estar psicológico dos neopentecostais brasileiros.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12154   open full text
• Enculturation Incarnate: Ritual Sensoria in U.S. Patriotic Holidays.
  Cindy Dell Clark.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  Because ritual is based on symbolism that takes intense sensory, enacted form, its features are well suited to children's cultural learning via sensorimotor engagement. An ethnographic study of US patriotic rituals at Memorial Day and Independence Day (July 4th), conducted during 2005–12, reveals how children participated and learned through sensoria and embodied experiences within these festival days. Public and private rituals evoked sense‐linked metaphoric meanings that primed children for American values, including themes of militarism and freedom. Consistent with other researchers’ findings regarding U.S. Passover seder, American Catholic First Communion, and the ritual enculturation of Sri Lankan child monks, young cultural members encounter ritual through embodied learning and sensoria and not necessarily via adult intentional instruction.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12153   open full text
• Accompanied Self: Debating Pentecostal Individual and Japanese Relational Selves in Transnational Japan.
  Suma Ikeuchi.
  Ethos. March 06, 2017
  While the notion of the individual figures prominently in the debate about Christian personhood, the concept of relational selves has shaped the existing literature on Japanese selfhood. I take this seeming divergence between “individual Christian” and “interdependent Japanese” as the point of departure to probe how Japanese‐Brazilian Pentecostal migrants in contemporary Japan understand and experience their sense of self. The article is based on 14 months of fieldwork in Toyota, Japan, which consisted of participant observation, interviews, and surveys among Brazilian and Japanese residents there. The discourses about the category of religion serve as a major source of data to tease out cultural understandings about “the authentic self.” I will argue that Pentecostal personhood does not fit within either the “individual” or the “relational.” The concept of “accompanied self” will then be proposed to accurately capture the kind of self that many migrant converts strive to embody.

  March 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/etho.12156   open full text
• Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: Explorations at the Edges of Culture and Consciousness.
  Tine M. Gammeltoft, Lotte Buch Segal.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  There is no abstract available for this paper.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12138   open full text
• From Filial Piety to Forgiveness: Managing Ambivalent Feelings in a Beijing House‐Church.
  Susanne Bregnbæk.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  This article is based on fieldwork in a Chinese Protestant house‐church in Beijing—more specifically, it focuses on a form of group therapy, which took place in the vicinity of the church. It combines two phenomena usually studied separately, namely the popularity of Chinese underground churches and China's so‐called “psycho‐boom.” Drawing on attachment theory, I focus on the psychic conflicts that draw certain people, in this case a young woman, Lin, to this kind of therapeutic/ritual context. Filial piety, the moral value that children should respect and honor their parents, who have sacrificed so much for them, remains a strong social norm in Chinese society. I argue that forbidden feelings such as anger directed at parents found expression in this Chinese house‐church. The ritual and therapeutic context can be understood as a cultural defense mechanism, which celebrates an inversion of dominant societal norms.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12143   open full text
• Silence as a Response to Everyday Violence: Understanding Domination and Distress Through the Lens of Fantasy.
  Tine M. Gammeltoft.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  Across the world, existing research indicates that many women respond with silence to marital abuse. This article offers an ethnographic investigation of the social and psychic forces behind Vietnamese women's silencing of violence and a theoretical exploration of how the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy—understood as unconscious or subconscious mental processes—may contribute to the analysis of everyday violence and psychic distress. Distinguishing between what I term deliberate and subconscious silence, I explore the role that fantasy plays when Vietnamese women silently endure intimate partner violence. Closer ethnographic attention to the fantasy‐constructions that sustain day‐to‐day lives can, I argue, strengthen the capacity of anthropology to comprehend how systems of everyday violence are upheld and rendered socially invisible.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12140   open full text
• Unthinkable Solitude: Successful Aging in Denmark Through the Lacanian Real.
  Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  As states across the world develop strategies for administering their aging populations, different assumptions and anxieties regarding the condition of old age and how they haunt people are disclosed, across national‐cultural settings. Within recent years, loneliness has been identified as one of the key threats to the well‐being of the elderly in the Danish welfare society, and the tendency to view solitary seniors in terms of “loneliness” and “social isolation”—along with the attempts to reintegrate these solitary seniors into society—reveals how solitude is being tied to detrimental states of existence. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork among healthcare workers and solitary elderly men in the rural area of southern Sealand, Denmark, this article lays out the Danish configuration of what has been called the paradigm of “successful aging.” However, not only is the attention to loneliness among Danish eldercare professionals a sign of an inherent fear; at the same time, I will argue, it reveals an inherent inability to conceptualize “solitude” as other than “loneliness.” By employing the concept of the Real—the enigmatic realm within Lacanian psychoanalysis that represents the limit of language—the aim of this article is to uncover how the current discourse on successful aging renders solitude “unthinkable.”

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12144   open full text
• Ambivalent Attachment — Melancholia and Political Activism in Contemporary Palestine.
  Lotte Buch Segal.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  This article argues that over the course of the past three decades a mood change has occurred in terms of how Palestinians relate to the ideal of an independent Palestinian state. During the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, which constitutes the golden age of Palestinian resistance towards Israel's occupation, the Palestinian resistance movement was characterized by a passionate belief in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation. Due to the consistent stalemate and even worsening of the conflict that have followed in the wake of the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2003, this passionate belief in the realization of a Palestinian state has been replaced by ambivalence toward that ideal. Based on insights from my intermittent fieldwork with families of Palestinian political prisoners from 2004 to 2011, this article suggests that the contemporary ambivalence surrounding the revolutionary project can be meaningfully analyzed using Freud's notion of melancholia. In Freud, melancholia accounts for the relation between a feeling of indeterminate loss and ambivalent attachment. The notion of melancholia thereby provides anthropology with a concept that can be used to name and explore the frayed attachment to the ideal of a Palestinian state in the context of an ongoing colonial occupation. The passionate politics of the First Intifada enabled a fusing of Palestinian personhood with the overall political project into a subject characterized by active resistance. In contrast, the ambivalent attachment that marks the link between self and state project in the Palestinian territories after the Second Intifada leads to a mood of melancholia. By analyzing the attachment to the political project as an indeterminate loss in the melancholic's ego, I argue that the Palestinian political project is part of the self and keeps its adherents in a repetitive temporal fold from which they are unable to escape, because they are obliged and compelled to keep fighting for a state that does not seem to materialize. Conceptually, melancholia has the capacity to elucidate the emotional and deeply intersubjective toll it takes to live and aspire to an ideal that seems further from realization by the hour.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12145   open full text
• Public Anxieties and Projective Identification: Therapeutic Encounters Between Danish Clairvoyants and Their Clients.
  Vibeke Steffen.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  The capacity to receive occult messages and look into the future is claimed by individuals in most societies and probably always has been. In Denmark, clairvoyance is a popular service offered at the alternative market for counseling and healing. During my fieldwork among Danish spiritualist mediums in 2007–08, I was often puzzled by the way in which clairvoyants and clients seemed to share the same kinds of problems. This observation steered my interests toward understanding how personal sensations and feelings are exchanged in therapeutic encounters and raised questions about who is doing what to whom. Drawing on Jung's concept of the wounded healer to highlight the clairvoyant's role as a channel for societal anxieties and Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification as a framework for understanding the defense mechanisms at stake in object relations, I argue that psychoanalysis may add an important critical dimension to the anthropology of therapeutic encounters.

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12142   open full text
• Psychoanalysis and Ethnography.
  Douglas Hollan.
  Ethos. December 07, 2016
  In this commentary, I discuss some of the theoretical and methodological issues the contributions to this special issue raise collectively, namely: how do we as anthropologists pick and choose among the many diverse psychoanalytic concepts available to us, especially when these concepts may come embedded in very different, and sometimes contradictory, theoretical assumptions about human behavior? Once we find a psychoanalytic concept that is useful for ethnographic work, can we or should we attempt to relate it to more experience near ethnopsychological terms and assumptions, ones that might seem more understandable and intuitive from a local point of view? How intimately should we know people, biographically or developmentally, before we attempt to apply psychoanalytic concepts to their behavior? And, given that George Devereux is cited as one of the inspirations for this special issue, what role can or should an awareness of countertransference play in ethnographic work, and what are the limits, if any, of psychoanalytic interpretation in an ethnographic context?

  December 07, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12139   open full text
• Despite Adults: Learning Experiences on the Tapajós River Banks.
  Chantal Medaets.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  In this article, I analyze learning practices that take place in the everyday life (outside of school or other institutional setting) of two villages in the Amazonian region of the Tapajós River basin in Brazil. These practices closely match the main attributes of what has been referred to as a “learning through intent participation” (Rogoff et al. 2003), or “learning as progressive participation in communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991) model—with one important difference. While the child learners may be keen participant observers, the experts display little interest in collaborating with novices or evince much empathy for them. I will describe and analyze the relationship between the rather disengaged experts and the eager novices, showing that this process can only be understood if we consider broader aspects of social relationships among peoples of the Tapajós.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12134   open full text
• New Studies of Children's Work, Acquisition of Critical Skills, and Contribution to the Domestic Economy.
  David F. Lancy.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  In spite of the fact that the very earliest ethnographers who paid any attention to children took note of the “precocity” displayed by children in both learning the household (e.g., caring for a younger sibling) and subsistence (harvesting and processing grain), tasks characteristic of the societies under investigation, the first synthesis and cross‐cultural compilation of this large body of descriptive material is quite recent. This first, introductory, article in this collection reviews those efforts to systematize the study of children's work and leads the reader through a catalog of the major conclusions or generalizations that have emerged from this analysis. To take a single example, the ethnographic record shows clearly that the work children do, whether differentiated by age, gender, or competence, serves, in large part, to shape their emerging identity. The Introduction then proceeds to forecast the following three articles, all of which advance significantly beyond our current understandings. A finer‐grained analysis reveals significant cross‐cultural variation around many of the generalizations made earlier regarding how children become helpers and workers.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12132   open full text
• What Makes Children Work? The Participative Trajectory in Domestic and Pastoral Chores of Children in Southern Mongolia.
  Aude Michelet.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  This article presents an ethnographic study of how children in rural southern Mongolia became competent at pastoral and domestic chores in the years 2006 and 2008–2009. Previous research shows that children's spontaneous interest in learning to work in order to be helpful is cross‐culturally pervasive. Little attention has, however, been paid to the fluctuating nature of children's motivation. In this article, I argue that like learning, motivation needs to be “situated.” Following six children's trajectory of participation in work activities at different ages, we see that their involvement was paved by different injunctions from adults, who at times welcomed or required their participation, and at others challenged or rebuffed their involvement. I examine how these children responded to these different modalities of participation and how those shaped their learning practices and motivation to work. The study demonstrates the importance of disentangling children's motivation to learn and participate from children's motivation to work. Cet article est une étude ethnographique des processus par lesquels des enfants en Mongolie méridionnale apprennent à accomplir des tâches pastorales et domestiques. Les études existantes suggèrent que l'intérêt des enfants à apprendre à travailler est universel. Ceci étant peu d'attention a été portée à la nature fluctuante de la motivation des enfants. Dans cet article, je défend la thèse que tout comme l'apprentissage, la motivation doit être “située.” En suivant la trajectoire participative des activités de travail de six enfants à différents âges dans les années 2006 et 2008–2009, nous découvrons que leur implication était guidée par différentes injonctions des adultes; soit qu'ils accueillaient la présence des enfants ou requeraient leur participation, soit qu'ils les mettaient au défi et les rabrouaient. J'examine comment ces enfants réagirent à ces différentes modalités de participation et comment celles‐ci contribuèrent à façonner leurs pratiques d'apprentissage et motivation à travailler. L’étude démontre l'importance de différencier la motivation des enfants à apprendre de leur motivation à travailler. [travail des enfants, appretissage, motivation, Mongolie, pastoralisme] Энэхүү нийтлэл нь угсаатны зүйн судалгааны хүрээнд Монголын өмнөд аймагийн хүүхдүүд мал аж ахуйн болон гэр ахуйн үүрэгт ажлуудыг гүйцэтгэн хийхийг сурч буй үйл явцын судалгаа юм. Одоогийн хийгдсэн судалгаанууд нь хүүхдүүдийн ажил сурах байгалын сонирхол бол бусдад дэм хүргэх мөн хамтач байх зорилго агуулдаг тухай саналыг дэвшүүлдэг. Гэхдээ хүүхдүүдийн хүсэл сонирхолын хувирамтгай шинж чанарт маш бага анхаарал хандуулсан байдаг. Уг нийтлэлээрээ, хөдөлмөр сургалтын зэрэгцээ хүүхдүүдийн хүсэл сонирхолыг “бий болгосон” байх шаардлагатай гэсэн онолыг би хамгаалж байна. 2006 болон 2008 аас 2009 онуудад өөр өөр насны зургаан хүүхдийн хөдөлмөрийн үйл ажиллагаанд оролцох арга замуудыг ажиглан судалснаар бид нар тэдний оролцоо нь насанд хүрэгчдийн зүгээс тулгасан шийдвэрээр зааварчлагдсан болохыг олж харсан бөгөөд тэд нь нэг талаас хүүхдүүдийг өөртөө татан урамшуулж эсвэл ажил хөдөлмөрт оролцуулах зорилгоор байнга хүсэлт гаргаж түүнчлэн уриалан дуудаж бас буруутган шийтгэж байв. Би эдгээр үйл явцын өөдөөс хүүхдүүд хэрхэн хариу үйлдэл үзүүлж буйг мөн эдгээр нь хүүхдүүдийн хөдөлмөр сурах, ажил хийх хүсэл сонирхолтой болох тэр дадалыг үүсгэн бий болгоход ямар ач холбогдол үзүүлж буйг шалган судалж байгаа болно. Энэхүү судалгаа нь хүүхдүүдийн ажил хөдөлмөр сурах мөн түүнд оролцох хүсэл сонирхол бол хөдөлмөрлөх идэвхээс өөр тул эдгээрийн хоорондын ялгааг тодруулах нь чухал болохыг нотолж байгаа юм. [хүүхдийн хөдөлмөр, хөдөлмөр сургалт, хүсэл сонирхол, Монгол, мал аж ахуй]

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12130   open full text
• How Do Children Become Workers? Making Sense of Conflicting Accounts of Cultural Transmission in Anthropology and Psychology.
  Christopher A. J. L. Little, David F. Lancy.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  This article uses children's work as a lens to examine methodological concerns in the study of cultural transmission. At present, scholars remain divided between two positions with regards to the processes of cultural transmission. The first perspective places the burden of skill acquisition on the child who “picks up” skills and ideas through exploration, observation, imitation, play, interaction with peers, participation with others in carrying out routine tasks, and other voluntary, self‐initiated activities. A second position assigns great importance to parents as teachers who transmit essential skills and knowledge to their children. We illustrate that this debate may not be strictly empirical. Instead, these perspectives emerge from the contrasting methodologies that are largely associated with different disciplines: interviews in psychology and ethnography in anthropology. Drawing upon a review of the literature as well as a case study concerning the Asabano of Papua New Guinea, this article problematizes the sole reliance upon decontextualized self report data. Instead, we call for interviews to be situated within an ethnographic framework which not only involves observation, but also considers local models of cultural transmission, local communicative practices, and sociocultural change.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12131   open full text
• Competing Etiologies of Trauma and the Mediation of Political Suffering: The Disengagement from the Gaza Strip and West Bank in Secular and Religious Therapeutic Narratives.
  Galia Plotkin Amrami.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  The forced evacuation of Jewish Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in August 2005 (known as the Disengagement) was an extremely controversial political event in Israeli public discourse. This article seeks to explore how political differences in the public sphere were reflected in the professional narratives of mental health practitioners. Based on my field notes documenting the processes of the narration of the Disengagement within various professional settings of Israeli mental health experts, I compare the narratives produced by practitioners who hold different ideological positions vis‐à‐vis the settlement project. I contend that the political views of practitioners expressed in causal explanations of the Disengagement experience and in the modes of mediation of this experience in order to mobilize empathy with evacuated settlers. By focusing on the professional narration and mediation of the experience of a controversial group of sufferers (“the bad victims,” as they might be called), this research highlights the importance of the anthropological perspective on therapeutic empathy as a socially mediated reflection of the moral experience of health practitioners.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12123   open full text
• Care, Closeness, and Becoming “Better”: Transformation and Therapeutic Process in American Adolescent Psychiatric Custody.
  Katie Rose Hejtmanek.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  In the United States, young people are remanded to psychiatric custody for the institutionalized treatment of mental illness, behavior disorders, and emotional disturbances, and forced to participate in this therapeutic system. Anthropological investigations of therapeutic process have focused on individuals actively seeking and engaging in treatment or a therapeutic process. Does transformation require a person fully accept the therapeutic system? Is a coerced therapeutic process still effective? This article engages with these questions by situating the therapeutic process in psychiatric custody for American adolescents. The youth in treatment accept that transformation and even healing take place but locate the etiology and form of this change differently than the official treatment paradigms. This case study illustrates that transformation and therapeutic process as multifaceted, especially in coercive contexts, and the efficacy of the therapeutic process as shaped by the life stage and political contexts of those engaged in the process.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12135   open full text
• Suffering Peacefully: Experiences of Infancy Death in Contemporary Zambia.
  Sesilie Smørholm.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  In Ng'ombe Township in Lusaka, the death of a baby is often met with silence. Based on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how the bereaved mother's silence is guided by wider cultural norms and values associated with death, by complex notions of what it means to be a person, and by local perceptions of mental health and well‐being. To enhance the complexity of the mother's silences, it also explores how structures of poverty manifest in mothers’ experiences of loss and how silence may hold feelings of inadequacy but also of care and compassion. Finally, the article aims to provide a counterweight to the predominant assumption that mothers in poor communities, who experience high levels of infant mortality, fail to mourn the death of their babies, as well as to psychological theories that assumes verbal expressions as vital for the mourner's mental recovery after loss.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12126   open full text
• Longing for a House in Ghana: Ghanaians’ Responses to the Dignity Threats of Elder Care Work in the United States.
  Cati Coe.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  Home health care is a growing occupation in the United States which calls for significant emotional labor. On the basis of interviews and participant observation with home health workers from Ghana, this article argues that home health work is different from other kinds of emotional labor in that living and working in the client's house are central to the conditions of work and the dignity assaults of workers’ experience. Among their strategies for responding to these dignity threats is to long for a house and to direct their energy toward an alternative social field through house construction “at home” in Ghana. Thus, the dignity threats experienced by immigrant home health workers raise concerns about the occupation's ability to retain workers as well as immigrants’ sense of worth and belonging in the United States.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12122   open full text
• Postures of Empowerment: Cultivating Aspirant Feminism in a Ugandan NGO.
  Erin V. Moore.
  Ethos. September 05, 2016
  The Kampala Programme for Empowering Girls, a Ugandan NGO, is part of a much larger transnational movement that aims to psychologically, economically, and politically empower adolescent girls around the world. Global girls’ empowerment advocates draw from the convergence of two lines of research: long‐standing demographic studies that correlate girls’ schooling with fewer and healthier pregnancies and western developmental psychology's concern with the adolescent girl's presumed crisis of self‐esteem. Yet, as anthropologists have long shown, the ways people grow up are culturally and historically specific. In order to “empower” young women in urban Uganda, the internationally educated, elite women running the NGO had to persuade their participants to articulate low self‐esteem, even as these young women claimed complete confidence. To do so, elite NGO officers entwined explicit feminist pedagogy with tastes for foreign foods, fashion, and travel, cultivating what I call “aspirant feminism”—a desire for membership in the transnational feminist movement because it offers pathways to social mobility that are both desirable and difficult to obtain for young Ugandan women. Paradoxically, the workshop became both the grounds for developing new aspirational capacities as well as an arena for the reproduction of class difference.

  September 05, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12124   open full text
• Emotional Performance as Work Skill: Low‐Income Women in Israel Learning to Talk the Talk.
  Amalia Sa'ar.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  This article documents the use of emotion pedagogies (EP) during economic empowerment projects for low‐income Hebrew‐speaking women in Israel, where a significant part of business‐training curriculum is dedicated to narratives of self and performances of reflexive, emotional speech. Participant observations in weekly training sessions reveal contradictory effects: Despite clear neoliberal undertones of self‐reliance, individual responsibility, and depoliticizing women's economic vulnerability, participants actually enjoy the opportunity to talk about their emotions and are particularly inclined to describe their work using the words “love,” “care,” and “giving.” From their perspective, EP yields some important benefits even if their income remains low: The workshops give them an opportunity to acquire middle‐class emotional competence, to exercise community, to undergo personal growth, and more. Exploring the various layers of signification that emotion pedagogies assume on the ground reveals a multivocal vernacular version that combines globally circulating ideas and locally specific discourses.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12120   open full text
• A Heartfelt Approach: On and Beyond Neoliberalism.
  Bonnie McElhinny.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  Scholars analyzing neoliberalism have a two‐pronged challenge, since “neoliberalism” is both too little, and at moments too extensively, used in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics (see also Allan and McElhinny, n.d.). This article considers what the contributions to this special issue contribute towards the study of neoliberalism with a focus on emotional pedagogies, as it considers where and how the articles also show contestations of and challenges to neoliberalism.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12119   open full text
• New Age with Chinese Characteristics? Translating Inner Child Emotion Pedagogies in Contemporary China.
  Sonya E. Pritzker.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  This article examines the translation of inner child emotion pedagogies in contemporary China. With a focus on several interactions taking place within evening salons, the article observes the pedagogical strategies and metalinguistic practices that translate as well as transform inner child pedagogies in novel ways. I emphasize the ways in which these encounters play upon the boundaries between “inner” and “outer” selves in the teaching of a distinct discursive consciousness regarding the role of language and embodied expression in the healing of the inner self. I argue that this creates both a distillation as well as expansion of western psychotherapeutic ideologies of language, emotion, and the self. I further highlight the ways in which the interactions index a broadly distributed process of concurrent events and sociohistorical circumstances that bring adapted versions of psychotherapeutic and New Age spiritual discourse into China. This article argues that the translation of inner child emotion pedagogies in China unfolds through a process of living translation, in which specific encounters serve as instances in which the meaning and implications of semiotic and linguistic registers are continuously remade in an ongoing stream of embodied interactions that are mediated by various ideologies of language, emotion, and personhood. 本文探讨了在当代中国内在小孩情感教学法的翻译。通过”内在小孩疗愈晚间沙龙”的几次互动, 本文重点观察教学策略和元语言实践——即对内在小孩疗愈法的创新翻译和转化。在这种独特的话语意识教学中, 笔者强调, 冲突在”内在”和”外在”自我界限间作用的这种方式, 在治愈内在自我过程中, 对语言和形象化表达的作用。笔者认为, 这在语言、情感和自我方面同时凝练而拓展了的西方心理治疗体系。笔者进一步强调, 互动指向广泛分布的同期事件和社会历史状况的这种方式, 把本土化的心理治疗学和新世代心灵的语言带入了中国。本文认为, 在中国的内在小孩情感疗愈是通过当下翻译来展开的, 在此翻译过程中, 特定冲突被作为微观民族志的实例。这些例子中, 符号学和语言学记录的含义持续地通过语言、情感和人格知识体系在具象化的互动中获得。

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12116   open full text
• Teaching Neoliberal Emotions through Christian Pedagogies in Fijian Kindergartens.
  Karen J. Brison.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  This article examines a Fijian kindergarten using Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), a curriculum produced by an American corporation for Christian homeschoolers, which combines academic and emotion pedagogies. Pedagogies prompting children to label, reflect on, and control their emotions are popular in American schools and said to develop skills necessary to be self‐directed, risk‐taking entrepreneurs under neoliberalism. In contrast, in Fiji, children educated with the ACE curriculum are told that feeling the correct emotions is a “commitment” and that submitting to authority will benefit everyone. The ACE curriculum appears to turn working‐class American children and children in peripheral countries like Fiji into submissive workers in corporations while middle‐class Euro‐American children are socialized to become innovative entrepreneurs. But further examination shows that Fijian parents and teachers see the curriculum as giving their children the proper skills to succeed in a world outside of Fiji.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12115   open full text
• Creating “Bright, Positive” Selves: Discourses of Self and Emotion in a Japanese Public‐Speaking Course.
  Cynthia Dickel Dunn.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  This article examines emotion pedagogy and technologies of the self in two Japanese settings: public‐speaking classes and business‐etiquette training for new employees. Data were gathered through participant‐observation and selective audio recording in both settings. The emotion pedagogy found in these classes aims at polishing the public presentation of self as akarui “bright” and sekkyokuteki “active.” The training focuses less on the interpretation of inner feelings or competence in a psychologized emotion register than on inculcating habits of thought and behavior which allow clients to function affectively and effectively within their social contexts. The study demonstrates how the late‐modern reflexive project of self‐fashioning can be embedded in institutional contexts and carried out through metapragmatically explicit emotion pedagogy focusing on the public presentation of self.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12121   open full text
• Making Emotional Connections in the Age of Neoliberalism.
  Steven M. Bialostok, Matt Aronson.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  Emotional expression, long derided as inimical to material success in the context of industrializing capitalism, now is seen in pedagogical circles as crucial to children's development into workers and citizens. Moving away from an emphasis on market rationality's so‐called person of reason, post‐Fordist economic environments increasingly venerate the less tangible “person of affect.” This study theorizes that a teacher's own emotional discourse shapes children's subjectivities and that this process corresponds with late capitalism's needs for workers who are reflexive and emotionally adept. Our analysis shows how the teacher uses emotional expression to accomplish a pedagogical goal, namely that of encouraging children to name and to know their own emotionality so they can better manage the “when and where” of its expression in other contexts, most especially the workplace. Children who effectively deploy these “softer” aspects of the self now represent yet another facet of entrepreneurial (neoliberal) subjectivity.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12118   open full text
• Emotion Pedagogies: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter?
  James M. Wilce, Janina Fenigsen.
  Ethos. June 06, 2016
  This introductory essay defines “emotion pedagogies” by identifying their distinctive qualities—an inclusive embrace of emotions often presented in the form of lists of emotion words to be spoken as part of “I‐messages;” treating emotions as teachable skill bundles, like other sets of skills conveyed along the model of formal schooling and thus involving a high degree of curricularization; and finally, the spread of emotion pedagogies as reflections and facilitators of Charles Taylor's “subjective turn,” Foucault's “subjectification,” and a unique self‐managed and self‐responsible neoliberal selfhood. We introduce each of the articles in this special issue and conclude with reflections on the transformative potential of emotion pedagogies. Tassä artikkelissa “tunnepedagogiikat” (emotion pedagogies) määritellään ilmiöksi, jonka ominaislaatuihin ja tavoitteisiin kuuluvat 1) tunteiden kattava hyväksyminen esimerkiksi tunnesanalistan avustamana, joita voidaan kayttää myös osana “minä‐viestejä” ja 2) tunteiden käsittäminen taitoina, joita voi oppia ja opettaa muodollisessa koulutuksessa kuten muitakin taitoja. Tunne‐pedagogiikkojen leviamistä ja suosiota käsitellään Charles Taylorin subjektiivisen käänteen ja Foucault'n subjektifikaation näkökulmista sekä heijastumina neoliberaalista tavasta nähdä minus uniikkina ja itsen päätöksistä riippuvaisena. Johdannossa esitellään myös kaikki erikoisnumeron artikkelit, ja lopuksi pohditaan tunnepedagogiikkojen transformatiivista potentiaalia.

  June 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12117   open full text
• Clinging to Hope through Education: The Consequences of Hope for Rural Laborers in Telangana, India.
  Tanya Jakimow.
  Ethos. March 04, 2016
  Education is for marginalized people in agrarian Telangana, India, the means to getting ahead, at the same time that structural conditions have diminished its potential. This article considers the consequences of education's failures for parents’ positioning within a society that is purported to be “moving forward.” I draw upon Berlant (2011) and Ahmed (2010) as a starting point to explore the possibility that the idea of progress through education is critical to one's sense of self, anchoring the self to conventional hopes and desires as a way to survive present‐day uncertainties. Variations in the narratives of villagers complicate any straightforward analysis, however. Hope is precarious when faced with the improbability of the next generation escaping hardship, coexisting with relative resignation and a lack of agency. It is the almost impossibility of getting ahead through education that establishes its theoretical possibility and hence the obligation to pursue normative aspirations. Through close attention to the texture of hope in agrarian Telangana, I aim to reveal unintended consequences of the continued emphasis on education as a development goal.

  March 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12110   open full text
• Transnational Ties: Children's Reactions to Parental Emigration in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
  Heather Rae‐Espinoza.
  Ethos. March 04, 2016
  Culture prominently shapes psychological adaptations and social adjustments for children facing potentially distressing circumstances. With three years of fieldwork on the children who stay after parental emigration in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I describe how children synthesize the competing values on émigré parents in wider society and in their transnational households that form a disjunctive socialization context. Children create a culturally constituted defense mechanism in their peer culture, which I call “transnational ties.” This defense allows children to view their geographically distant émigré parents as emotionally present by emphasizing continuing bonds, downplaying transitional periods, focusing on age‐graded care, and disconnecting family from the domestic unit. Children's personal practices reveal that enculturation is a social and psychological process.

  March 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12111   open full text
• Culture and the Jitters: Guild Affiliation and Online Gaming Eustress/Distress.
  Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, Michael G. Lacy, H.J. Francois Dengah, Greg Batchelder, Scarlett Eisenhower, Rory Sascha Thompson.
  Ethos. March 04, 2016
  We examine how online sociocultural context influences play experience in the popular online role‐playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW). We focus on how guilds, in‐game associations of like‐minded players, establish social relationships and cultural understandings that shape online play experience. Some guilds help their members regulate the stressful arousal emerging from challenging gaming activities—such as collaborative raids, where multiple players together try to defeat challenging opponents termed bosses—maximizing stress' positive eustressful potential. By contrast, so‐called “hard‐core” raiding guilds, the primary focus of this article, push their members to more extreme forms of online gaming, linking in‐game arousal with problematic patterns of play, potentially transforming pleasurable gaming eustress into harmful distress. Overall, we treat guilds as emergent communities of play, which, in the manner they differentially regulate their members’ gaming experiences, sharply illuminate the deep sociocultural shaping of the stress process. We suggest that these cultural processes are less visible in studies focusing more narrowly on distress or eustress alone—typically, medical anthropology in the first case, games studies in the second—making a balanced approach such as ours critical to psychological anthropologists hoping to clarify how culture lends psychobiological arousal its positive or negative valence.

  March 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/etho.12108   open full text
• Toward an Anthropology of the Imaginary: Specters of Disability in Vietnam.
  Tine M. Gammeltoft.
  Ethos. April 15, 2014
  In this article, I discuss the analytical potential that the notion of the imaginary holds for anthropology as a concept that may capture some of the more subdued, yet socially vigorous, moods and sensations that hover where personal experience and socially salient forms of power merge. The ethnographic occasion for my inquiry is the eager uptake of new technologies for selective reproduction in Vietnam; technologies that are actively promoted by the party‐state as an element in efforts to enhance “population quality.” Drawing on nearly three years of fieldwork conducted in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, I frame selective reproduction as an issue of power and politics, investigating how people's fantasies, fears, and imaginings blend with the workings of state power in this realm. Attention to imaginary constructions of self and society, I argue, can further anthropological understanding of the ways in which state policies are shaped, implemented, justified, and received.

  April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/etho.12046   open full text
• From Ghosts to Ancestors (and Back Again): On the Cultural and Psychodynamic Mediation of Selfscapes.
  Douglas Hollan.
  Ethos. April 15, 2014
  In this article, I use the retelling of a dream experience from a Toraja elder to illustrate how cultural and psychodynamic factors combine and intertwine to mediate self‐other and intraself relationships. I use the concept of “selfscapes” to suggest how dynamic, fluid, and contingent self‐other distinctions often are but also to capture the perduring aspects of memory and self‐organization that are sometimes lost or underemphasized by the strong focus on intersubjectivity in the social sciences today. My analysis builds on some of A. Irving Hallowell's seminal ideas about how psychodynamic theories and concepts might be used to enrich and extend cultural phenomenological analysis.

  April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/etho.12047   open full text
• Changing Cultural Pathways through Gender Role and Sexual Development: A Theoretical Framework.
  Adriana M. Manago, Patricia M. Greenfield, Janna L. Kim, L. Monique Ward.
  Ethos. April 15, 2014
  Greenfield's () theory linking sociodemographic change to dynamic cultural values for family interdependence versus individual independence is applied to sexual and gender role socialization and development. The theory explains how cultural pathways for sexual and gender‐role development transform in concert with sociodemographic changes: urbanization, formal schooling, capitalism, and communication technologies. As environments become more urban, commercial, and technological, with more opportunities for formal education, sexual development moves away from the ideals of procreation and family responsibility and toward the ideals of personal pleasure and personal responsibility. At the same time, gender‐role development moves away from the ideals of complementary and ascribed gender roles and toward chosen and equal gender roles. We present psychological, anthropological, and sociological evidence for these trends in a variety of communities undergoing social and ecological change.

  April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/etho.12048   open full text
• Becoming a Moral Child amidst China's Moral Crisis: Preschool Discourse and Practices of Sharing in Shanghai.
  Jing Xu.
  Ethos. April 15, 2014
  This article explores the moral development of Chinese children through the discrepancies between the ideologies and practices of adults and children. School educators and parents promote an egalitarian norm of sharing—“share with everyone”—in the hope of cultivating altruism and cooperation, values seen as a corrective to China's universally deplored “moral crisis.” By contrast, young children spontaneously engage in strategic sharing—“extend favors so others can help you”—in their everyday interactions. Such practices resonate with the adult norm of guanxi (exchange of favors) that is the object of ambivalent attitudes in modern Chinese discourse. This study combined ethnographic and experimental methods to examine children's spontaneous choices and their implication in current discourse, showing how the anthropology of childhood may contribute to a finer‐grained understanding of contemporary Chinese cultural dynamics as well as the conversation between psychological anthropology and developmental psychology on the emergence of prosocial dispositions in cultural processes.

  April 15, 2014   doi: 10.1111/etho.12049   open full text
• “The Wrong Holy Ghost”: Discerning the Apostolic Gift of Discernment Using a Signaling and Systems Theoretical Approach.
  Christopher Dana Lynn.
  Ethos. May 14, 2013
  I develop a case study of demonic glossolalia (speaking in tongues) for its cues in conveying religious commitment among a congregation of Apostolic Pentecostals. From the perspective of signaling theory, costly or hard‐to‐fake signals may convey psychological dispositions of members and would‐be members toward an inclusive community. I utilize signaling theory in a broader systems approach to make sense of an incident of speaking in tongues that a congregation decries as demonic. To facilitate this interpretation, forms and motivations of glossolalia—the sine qua non that one has accepted Jesus as personal savior—are described and examined, including examples of calm and excited “Holy Ghost” and “backslider” and “mistaken demonic” glossolalia. To an outsider, some of the differences among these signaling modes may be difficult to distinguish, but the underlying religious and family dynamics provide insights as to how church members make distinctions they attribute to the spiritual “gift of discernment.” This approach promises to make unique contributions toward understanding the implicit folk psychologies of practices that, according to Pentecostals, mark them as “weird” or “odd.”

  May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/etho.12016   open full text
• Streamlining the Muse: Creative Agency and the Reconfiguration of Charismatic Education as Professional Training in Israeli Poetry Writing Workshops.
  Eitan Wilf.
  Ethos. May 14, 2013
  In this article I seek to theorize recent institutional transformations of creative agency that involve the increasing embeddedness of art socialization in the professional and bureaucratic infrastructure of various sorts of educational organizations in the contemporary West. I argue that institutional art education involves the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training, and I suggest that this provides an opportunity to theorize the features shared between charismatic education and professional training against the backdrop of a research tradition that has viewed them as antithetical to one another. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in two Israeli poetry writing workshops, which draw their pedagogy from the rapidly growing field of creative writing programs in the United States.

  May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/etho.12012   open full text
• Role‐Play and “As If” Self in Everyday Life.
  Avi Shoshana.
  Ethos. May 14, 2013
  In this article, I examine the use of role‐play strategy and its outcomes in field experiment conditions in the Boarding School for Gifted Disadvantaged in Israel. Data derive from two major sources: governmental protocols related to the organizational production of a role‐play technique and interviews with graduates of the experimental school years after their role‐playing experience. Analysis of governmental protocols shows the intentional organizational usage of the term gifted within the school population is based on a bureaucratic simulation of giftedness, which in turn creates a distinction between natural giftedness and institutional giftedness. In‐depth interviews with graduates of the school indicate that they experience their giftedness as artificial (“as if” giftedness). They describe ethnic conversion and distinction between two types of self (before and after the boarding school). My concluding discussion identifies a particular kind of reflexivity (the presence of absence) in the boarding school graduates’ concepts of self. In turn, this reflexivity indicates phenomenological consequences latent in role‐play simulations in field experiment conditions. The findings of this article enable me to address a pertinent issue of psychological anthropology not sufficiently discussed in the literature: the manner in which individuals who experience (re)construction of the self maintain their selfhood many years after the (re)construction.

  May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/etho.12013   open full text
• “My Heart Opens and My Spirit Flies”: Musical Exemplars of Psychological Flexibility in Health and Healing.
  Benjamin D. Koen.
  Ethos. May 14, 2013
  Across several disciplines in the health and social sciences, psychological flexibility is gaining in influence and explanatory power as a conceptual frame to better understand diverse cultural and clinical contexts of health and healing. Although music as a potential primer of psychological flexibility is seldom considered in extant research, key contributions have framed aspects of music's potential efficacy to promote health and healing within the construct of psychological flexibility. Building from this research and from studies in psychology and anthropology concerned with flexibility, and based on field research I conducted in the Pamir Mountain region of Tajik Badakhshan, I explore how the preeminent genre of Pamiri devotional music, known as maddoh, facilitates or primes psychological flexibility for participants. In this case study, priming a state of psychological flexibility is accomplished by engaging specific cultural exemplars found in the natural and built environments, the local belief system, poetry, prayer, and music, creating a multilayered network of flexibility.

  May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/etho.12014   open full text
• Embodied Identity and Political Participation: Squatters’ Engagement in the Participatory Budget in Brazil.
  Ana Paula Pimentel Walker.
  Ethos. May 14, 2013
  In this article I examine subjective identity transformations among those who take part in programs of participatory governance, particularly the innovative mechanism of municipal resource allocation called the Participatory Budget. Focusing on the engagements of Porto Alegre city squatters, I aim to capture ambivalences that distinguish local and international discourses of participation and private property. Building on the dialectical relationship between narrative/figured worlds and positional identities, I view the Participatory Budget as a framework of meanings in flux within which some squatters who rearrange their positional identities along lines of social and power relations are then empowered to change their political practices. A novel emphasis on the distinction between squatters’ positional and embodied identities allows me to assess the political and psychological impacts of this form of participatory governance for people living in squatter settlements. I demonstrate the importance of embodied political practices and locally situated notions of male and female bodies in the squatters’ appropriation and refashioning of the identities imposed by local and international organizations.

  May 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/etho.12015   open full text