Family,Networks and Academics

The history of anthropology is a growing field of study within the discipline itself. Our series ‘Key Informants on the History of Anthropology’ is offered as a contribution to the discussion of how anthropology, as it is understood and practised today, evolved and took shape. In this invited article, Larissa Adler Lomnitz reflects on how a cosmopolitan background aroused an interest in her in questions of social identity. Her studies of social networks in urban situations in Latin America are renowned in anthropology. Here she relates how they unfolded—and how they have been intimately connected to her family life.     

Reflections on Teaching Social Violence in an Age of Genocide and a Time of War

This article is a reflection by a teacher and a student on "structural-violence pedagogy," the process of teaching and learning about the structures of inequality implicated in various forms of social violence, including those of everyday life, massacre, and genocide. Using a case study of an undergraduate course in anthropology, we explore the complexity and emotionally charged nature of this field, some innovative teaching strategies, and contributions of anthropology to understanding a world marked and marred by war, genocide, racialization, and structural poverty. The teacher shapes a course of study informed by critical pedagogy and theories about violence and power. The student draws on her personal experiences, her intellectual interests, and her yearning for fuller answers to deeper questions as she seeks to reciprocate what is being taught to her. Together, teacher and student explore the promise in the power of teaching for understanding the world as it does exist.     

"Mrs. Landes Meet Mrs. Benedict": Culture Pattern and Individual Agency in the 1930s

This article presents Ruth Landes as a transitional figure in 20th-century anthropology between the culture and personality studies of the interwar years and the study of power and structural dynamics so important in the discipline by the end of the century. Expanding on Benedict's theory of culture pattern and employing the life history method, Landes highlights in her work relations of power in the structural dynamics of culture as she explores: the experience of social marginality; the making of the public symbolic order; the plurality of local knowledge systems; the role of the individual; what she called "the moot problem of women and men"; and the relationship of researcher and researched. [Keywords: Ruth Landes, Ruth Benedict, culture, gender, power]     

Inbreeding,eugenics, and Helen Dean King (1869–1955)

Helen Dean King’s scientific work focused on inbreeding using experimental data collected from standardized laboratory rats to elucidate problems in human heredity. The meticulous care with which she carried on her inbreeding experiments assured that her results were dependable and her theoretical explanations credible. By using her nearly homozygous rats as desired commodities, she also was granted access to venues and people otherwise unavailable to her as a woman. King’s scientific career was made possible through her life experiences. She earned a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College under Thomas Hunt Morgan and spent a productive career at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia where she had access to the experimental subjects which made her career possible. In this paper I examine King’s work on inbreeding, her participation in the debates over eugenics, her position at the Wistar Institute, her status as a woman working with mostly male scientists, and her involvement with popular science.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

MP offers a testimonial: “I've had superb care,and I'm alive today because of it”

When Beryl Gaffney, a Liberal member of Parliament, was told she had a brain tumour, she decided to take control of her own life. Instead of allowing the first doctor she saw to rush her to hospital, she travelled to Montreal and London, Ont., to get a second and third opinion. Then she showed neurologists in Atlanta her test results and asked which of the three options for treatment she had received coincided with their treatment recommendation. Today, she is back in the House of Commons, where she spends much of her time debating health care issues.     

Stigma, community, ethnography: Joan Ablon's contribution to the anthropology of impairment-disability

Joan Ablon has helped establish the anthropology of impairment-disability and significantly contributed to the role of anthropology in disability studies. In this article, we review the development of and situate Ablon's ethnographic research in the anthropology of impairment-disability. We then address various methodological issues in her work including her ethnographic approach, her grounding in action anthropology and her support for the development of the academic study of disability in anthropology and the careers of disabled anthropologists. The next section of the article examines Ablon's use of the notion of stigma, her understanding of community, and her engagement with disability rights. As examples of themes important to disability studies, we present her discussion of the implications of the ideal of the body beautiful, and gender differences in negotiating intimacy for people with physical differences. We close with a discussion of the future of an anthropology of impairment-disability. [disability, impairment, Ablon, genetics, ethnography]     

Anna Fraentzel Celli (1878-1958)

This paper provides a short history of Anna Fraentzel Celli life, from her arrival in Italy in 1898 to her death in 1958, reviewing available documents and written testimonies. Anna Fraentzel was born in Berlin in 1878, third of four daughters from a bourgeois family; her maternal grandfather, Luigi Traube, was a very well known physician, as well as her father Oscar, and she developed an early interest in medicine that she couldn't fulfill: actually after her father's death she was forced to shorten her education, she couldn't enter the medical school, as she would have liked to, and she attended the nursing school, instead, displaying a lot of good practical sense. As a nurse in Hamburg in 1896 she met Prof. Angelo Celli, who was there on a professional visit, and who assisted the young nurse in finding a job at the city hospital. She was much younger than him, who was already a middle aged respected scientist; anyhow, even after his departure, they kept in touch and eventually fell in love. They married in 1899 and she moved to Rome to work at the S. Spirito Hospital joining a brilliant group of physicians and researchers as Tommasi-Crudeli, Marchiafava, Bignami, Bastianelli, Dionisi, Grassi, and her husband Angelo. They had long been studying the mode of transmission of the malaria infection and in 1898 they had identified the mosquito Anopheles as the vector of the malaria parasite. She got enthusiastically involved both in the scientific work and in the antimalarial campaign which Celli promoted in the Agro Romano. The strong personality of Anna Celli, her active involvement in social problems, her passionate dedication to her work, her peculiar way of being feminist, expressed fully her commitment to the struggle against malaria and illiteracy in the Agro Romano and in the Paludi Pontine at the beginning of the twentieth century. She must be credited as a major force in the creation and functioning of the Peasant Schools, as well as in the organisation of the experimental antimalarial health clinics. After her husband's death in 1914 she continued as a promoter of the antimalarial campaign, co-operating with the Red Cross and other institutions. Moreover, she edited the scientific and historical papers which Angelo Celli had collected and written during his life. She was also a prolific writer and lecturer on these issues and gained widespread appreciation both in Italy and in Germany. Toward the end of her life she retired to a nursing home in Rome where she died almost alone in 1958.     

Suffering at the end of life

In the end‐of‐life context, alleviation of the suffering of a distressed patient is usually seen as a, if not the, central goal for the medical personnel treating her. Yet it has also been argued that suffering should be seen as a part of good dying. More precisely, it has been maintained that alleviating a dying patient’s suffering can make her unable to take care of practical end‐of‐life matters, deprive her of an opportunity to ask questions about and find meaning in and for her existence, and detach her from reality. In this article, I argue that the aims referred to either do not support suffering or are better served by alleviating it. When the aims would be equally well served by enduring suffering and relieving it, the latter appears to be the preferable option, given that the distress a patient experiences has no positive intrinsic value. Indeed, as the suffering can be very distressing, it may not be worth bearing even if that was the best way to achieve the aims: the distress can sometimes be bad enough to outbalance the worth of achieving the goals. Having considered an objection to the effect that a patient can have a self‐regarding moral duty to endure the distress she faces at the end of life, I conclude that the burden of proof is on the side of those who maintain that the suffering experienced at the end of life ought to be endured as a part of dying well.     

The William Allan Memorial Award. Presented to Elizabeth F. Neufeld, Ph. D., at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics Detroit, September 29-October 2, 1982

The opportunity for this presentation provides me with three gratifications. The first and most important is that the scientist being honored is Elizabeth Neufeld. The second is the honor bestowed upon me by being selected to introduce Dr. Neufeld. Finally, the preparation of this introduction has provided me with the opportunity to reconstruct a scientific career from its beginnings to its present exciting momentum, an exercise in which I was helped with great enthusiasm by a number of people who have known Liz during the various phases of her scientific life. I am particularly pleased to note that our awardee is the product of that unique breeding ground of success stories, the special New York education system. After arriving in New York in 1940 at the age of 12 from Paris, a refugee from Nazi persecutions in Europe, Liz Neufeld, like so many other young refugees at the time, qualified for one of the specialized schools in New York--the Hunter College High School. From there she went to Queens College, one of the major high-quality free institutions of higher learning of the New York City college system, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1948. Obviously turned on to a scientific career, she successfully applied for a research assistantship at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, where she worked with the first of her mentors, Dr. Elizabeth Russell, to this day her good friend and enthusiastic admirer. Her first publications are derived from that experience and are concerned with hematologic genetics of mice.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Embracing precarity across species: Muslim ethics and care for stray dogs in Russia

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg between 2015 and 2016, this article puts work on postsocialist precarity in conversation with scholarship on piety and interspecies care in Muslim contexts to explore how Aliya, a low-income Slavic convert to Islam, responded to social and economic hardships by tending to stray dogs. In doing so, she did not turn away, turn inwards, or turn political in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, she engaged in what I term ‘embracing precarity’, which I define as a response to uncertainty, grounded in Islamic spirituality, ethics, and care. By embracing canine tactility – often in departure from cultural norms concerning stray dogs in Islam and at the risk of deepening her own vulnerability – Aliya embarked on a path towards God with nonhuman others. The emergent relatedness between her and the dogs illustrates how striving for an ethical Muslim life amid uncertainty may open one up to experimentation, improvisation, and becoming with precarious others in a pursuit of a relationship with God and a favourable afterlife.     

Of sad and wished-for years: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's lifelong illness

The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning suffered for most of her life from an illness that her physicians were never able to diagnose, and that Barrett Browning scholars and others have tried to diagnose since her death in 1861. Many suggestions have been offered, but none has been convincing. By happenstance, my daughter was reading the correspondence of Elizabeth and Robert Browning not long ago, and she recognized the symptoms described as those of the rare muscle-weakening disorder she herself has, hypokalemic periodic paralysis (HKPP). The evidence from Barrett Browning's letters and the diary she kept when she was 25 strongly suggest she too had HKPP.     

Grasping the past. delay can improve visuomotor performance.

"Optic ataxia" is caused by damage to the human posterior parietal cortex (PPC). It disrupts all components of a visually guided prehension movement, not only the transport of the hand toward an object's location, but also the in-flight finger movements pretailored to the metric properties of the object. Like previous cases, our patient (I.G.) was quite unable to open her handgrip appropriately when directly reaching out to pick up objects of different sizes. When first tested, she failed to do this even when she had previewed the target object 5 s earlier. Yet despite this deficit in "real" grasping, we found, counterintuitively, that I.G. showed good grip scaling when "pantomiming" a grasp for an object seen earlier but no longer present. We then found that, after practice, I.G. became able to scale her handgrip when grasping a real target object that she had previewed earlier. By interposing catch trials in which a different object was covertly substituted for the original object during the delay between preview and grasp, we found that I.G. was now using memorized visual information to calibrate her real grasping movements. These results provide new evidence that "off-line" visuomotor guidance can be provided by networks independent of the PPC.     

Epistemic artefacts: on the uses of complexity in anthropology

Distinctions between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ have enjoyed a long and varied career in anthropology. Simplicity was once part of a collective fantasy about what life was like elsewhere, tingeing studies of tribal life with human longing for simpler ways of being. With the reflexive turn and the rise of cultural critique, simplicity has been all but excommunicated in favour of widespread diagnoses of complexity. In this article, I tease out some transformations in the uses of complexity in anthropology, and weave in some critical responses to these uses, spanning many decades, from within the discipline. I pay special attention to recent critiques by anthropologists who are beginning to grow weary of complexity as both an end‐in‐itself for scholarship and an empirical diagnosis. For these critics, complexity is deeply entwined with anthropological methods and knowledge practices. Drawing on these critical views, I suggest that complexity may be an epistemological artefact, rather than something that can be diagnosed ‘out there’, and offer a way of reframing complexity as a ‘dominant problematic’ in anthropology and beyond.     

Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler's recent writings on kinship. In this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping to lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. Butler examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed the incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler's critique of kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to a vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the state. I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, whether or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. Anthropology's ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and recognition that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.     

Rational desires and the limitation of life-sustaining treatment

It is accepted that treatment of previously competent, now incompetent patients can be limited if that is what the patient would desire, if she were now competent. Expressed past preferences or an advance directive are often taken to constitute sufficient evidence of what a patient would now desire. I distinguish between desires and rational desires. I argue that for a desire to be an expression of a person's autonomy, it must be or satisfy that person's rational desires. A person rationally desires a course of action if that person desires it while being in possession of all available relevant facts, without committing relevant error of logic, and "vividly imagining" what its consequences would be like for her. I argue that some competent, expressed desires obstruct autonomy. I show that several psychological mechanisms operate to prevent a person rationally evaluating what future life in a disabled state would be like. Rational evaluation is difficult. However, treatment limitation, if it is to respect autonomy, must be in accord with a patient's rational desires, and not merely her expressed desires. I illustrate the implications of these arguments for the use of advance directives and for the treatment of competent patients.     

‘Follow me,and I will make you fishers of men’: the moral and political scales of migration in the central Mediterranean

This article offers recent dynamics of unauthorized migration and interception in the central Mediterranean as an example of historical anthropology of transnational region formation. It exemplifies how we can rescale classical themes in Mediterraneanist anthropology – hospitality, in this case – to illuminate transnational processes. I argue that anthropologists actually share with human rights advocates and European officials these ways of thinking about the scales of the moral and the political dimensions of migration, and I offer an alternative understanding of the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty as well as a clue about how regions come to life.