Seduced by Images: Identity and Schooling in the Lives of Puerto Rican Girls

Based on a two-year ethnographic study at an urban middle school, this article describes the power that images created by and about Puerto Rican girls hold in shaping their schooling experiences. Using a black, critical, feminist framework, I show how dichotomizing the sexuality of Puerto Rican females against their intellectual development obscures the complex ways that identities are co-constructed and then affirmed, appropriated, or resisted within their school site. I conclude that to resist the reproduction of educational inequality in the lives of Puerto Rican females, we must explore and seek to transform the influential ways that identities are mediated and educational outcomes are produced within the school contexts where Puerto Rican females are educated . [Puerto Rican, urban, educational equity, ethnicity, gender]     

Patient waiting: care as a gift and debt in the Thai healthcare system

Drawing on fieldwork in Chiang Mai during 2010 and 2012, I examine poor Thais’ and Shan migrants’ experiences of receiving healthcare from a public hospital, and, in parallel, care from the state. While universal health coverage has become a way in which the state finds legitimacy in people's lives through giving care, being a recipient of state aid is implicated in the emotive domain of waiting. By focusing on how people feel and think of a gift and debt of care, I suggest that flows of affects that loom large in social interactions within the public hospital denote not only poor people's subordinate position but also their effort to achieve a sense of mutuality and moral autonomy. This study contributes to a broader understanding of experiences of paternalism, inequality, and dependence by illuminating people's agentive submission into relations of care.     

Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform

Drawing on fieldwork in Harlem at the onset of welfare reform, I argue in this article for both a social structural and a cultural approach to the study of poor families facing the consequences of this historic policy change. Ethnographic understanding of household organization, kinship networks, reciprocal dependencies, intergenerational relations, migration, and gender must be brought to bear if we are to chart the responses of the poor to welfare reform. Meaning and perceived intentions must be central if we are to grasp how the targets of policy change understand the new economic and bureaucratic circumstances of their lives. These themes are illustrated by drawing on accounts of several households in Harlem—African American and Latino—in order to explore how both structural and cultural forces may shape responses to welfare reform, [welfare reform, poverty, household organization, working poor]     

Evidence for social role in a dolphin social network

Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right choices. In many instances individuals will make their own choices and the behaviour of the group will be a democratic integration of everyone’s decision. However, in some instances it can be advantageous to follow the choice of a few individuals in the group if they have more information regarding the situation that has arisen. Here I provide early evidence that decisions about shifts in activity states in a population of bottlenose dolphin follow such a decision-making process. This unshared consensus is mediated by a non-vocal signal, which can be communicated globally within the dolphin school. These signals are emitted by individuals that tend to have more information about the behaviour of potential competitors because of their position in the social network. I hypothesise that this decision-making process emerged from the social structure of the population and the need to maintain mixed-sex schools.     

Valuing Lives and Allocating Resources: A Defense of the Modified Youngest First Principle of Scarce Resource Distribution

In this paper, I argue that the ‘modified youngest first’ principle provides a morally appropriate criterion for making decisions regarding the distribution of scarce medical resources, and that it is morally preferable to the simple ‘youngest first’ principle. Based on the complete lives system's goal of maximizing complete lives rather than individual life episodes, I argue that essential to the value we see in complete lives is the first person value attributed by the experiencer of that life. For a life to be ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete,’ the subject of that life must be able to understand the concept of a complete life, to have started goals and projects, and to know what it would be for that life to be complete. As the very young are not able to do this, it can reasonably be said that their characteristically human lives have not yet begun, giving those accepting a complete lives approach good reason to accept the modified youngest first principle over a simple ‘youngest first’ approach.     

Community Writing, Participatory Research, and an Anthropological Sensibility

Participatory research is a radical praxis through which marginalized people acquire research capabilities that they use to transform their own lives. In this article, I examine how parent writers incorporated facets of community writing into their research practice as they developed their practices and identities as researchers. I also consider how anthropology, as both research practice and sensibility, contributed to the ways I engaged as an outside collaborator with these parent researchers.  [community writing, participatory research, praxis, anthropological sensibility]     

Queer in America: Citizenship for Sexual Minority Youth

Sexual minority youth face many challenges in their daily lives. This article considers the barriers that hinder their opportunities for citizenship development in 3 key developmental domains: family, faith, and education. Theoretical perspectives on sexuality and citizenship provide a lens through which to view examples of settings in which sexual minority youth have created new spaces within which to explore their identities, develop community, and create social change. These settings include online communities for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth, and high school Gay-Straight Alliances.     

On Agonising: Street Charity and First Ethics

To agonise is to “undergo great mental anguish through worrying about something,” according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English. I suggest that agonising in this sense is a fundamental response to any ethical dilemma. It has a long intellectual and literary lineage. In this essay, I agonise over the dilemmas posed by street beggars, their intrusiveness and their appeal to our intuitive sense of social duty. I explore the discomfort we may feel at their presence, and the value that discomfort may have for the evolution of our ethical lives.     

"Hey, Those Shoes Are Out of Uniform": African American Girls in an Elite High School and the Importance of Habitus

We examine how race and class influenced the lives of six African American high school seniors who attended a predominantly white, elite, independent secondary school. Race and class contributed to an organizational habitus of the school characterized by white and wealthy privilege. Interaction of that dominant habitus with the dissimilar individual habitus of the students resulted in a form of symbolic violence—symbolic violence the black students knowingly endured in exchange for the social mobility afforded by attending the elite school.     

“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.     

Neonatal Euthanasia: Why Require Parental Consent?

The Dutch rules governing neonatal euthanasia, known as the Groningen Protocol, require parental consent for severely disabled infants with poor prognoses to have their lives terminated. This paper questions whether parental consent should be dispositive in such cases, and argues that the potential suffering of the neonate or pediatric patient should be the decisive factor under such unfortunate circumstances.     

Biocultural Factors in School Achievement for Mopan Children in Belize

Mayan children in Belize face a number of challenges to school success. Their families are the poorest of the poor, and the Mopan children in this study exhibit poor growth and poor school achievement. But a direct relationship between growth and school achievement was evident only for current nutritional status, not for nutritional history. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data revealed that school achievement for these Mopan children may relate more to family attributes and attitudes than to health and nutritional status. The strongest predictors of school achievement were father's literacy and grade level in school.     

Scientific discoveries as cultural displays: a further test of Miller's courtship model

The biographies of 280 scientists demonstrate that the age distribution of their career peaks is identical to those of jazz musicians, painters, and writers, and that this universal age profile holds only among scientists who were married some time in their lives. I interpret this as support for Miller's cultural display model in an evolutionarily novel environment.     

Moving ethnography online: researching Brazilian migrants' online togetherness

Abstract

This article contributes to recent scholarship on the changing nature of fieldwork practices within migration research, focusing on the practice of online ethnography. It makes a case for the significance of the internet and, more specifically, social network sites, in the experience of many migrants. I state that online togetherness is an integral part of the lives of many migrants which also interrelates with ‘offline’ aspects of their social lives. Therefore, I argue that current research on migration would benefit from a more balanced combination of offline and online ethnography, taking into account how online connectivity affects the nature of migration and the conditions of being a migrant. Methodologically, I suggest that ethnography is well suited for generating understandings of the significance of the internet in the experience of migrants, but that a number of adjustments in methods of data collection and analysis must be made.     

Gender and Risk in a Matrifocal Caribbean Community: A View from Behavioral Ecology

Matrifocality is a feature of Caribbean communities in which mothers and adult daughters often form the household core. I argue that daughter-biased parental care underlies matrifocality. Parental investment (PI) theory predicts sex-biased care, but factors promoting daughter preference are not always clearly specified. If sons are more likely than daughters to experience unpredictable hazards, then parents may bias their efforts toward daughters. In this study, I examine gender differences in rural Dominica and test PI predictions. Men were more likely to be poor and develop alcoholism and less likely to migrate or attend high school than women were. Educational outcomes showed a Trivers-Willard effect: Boys from unfavorable family environments were less likely to receive secondary education than were other boys, but there was no association for girls. PI variables generally accounted for less variance in men's outcomes than women's, suggesting that unpredictable hazards for sons may promote daughter preference and matrifocality.     

Resource conflicts and the anthropology of the dark and the good in highlands Papua New Guinea

In this article I consider why individuals sacrifice their lives for the collective. In the Porgera Valley of highlands Papua New Guinea, young men who are called ‘Rambos’ engage in sustained tribal conflicts due to increasing social inequalities in an area that is supposedly benefiting from socioeconomic development. The opening of the Porgera Gold Mine in 1990 ushered in an era of anticipated benefits that were hoped to transform the lives of the region's subsistence horticulturalists. Yet, anticipated flows of mining money and social benefits have largely failed to materialise. The abjection experienced by young men eventuated into a series of tribal fights, resulting in deaths, displacements, and the destruction of most infrastructure. I examine the fighting and its aftermath in relation to anthropologies of the dark and the good and argue that these polar opposites can hinder more subtle understandings of value plurality among Porgerans.     

'He is the one who is providing you with everything so whatever he says is what you do': A Qualitative Study on Factors Affecting Secondary Schoolgirls’ Dropout in Rural Western Kenya

Education is an effective way to improve girls’ self-worth, health, and productivity; however there remains a gender gap between girls’ and boys’ completion of school. The literature around factors influencing girls’ decision to stay in school is limited. Seven focus group discussions took place among 79 girls in forms 2 to 4 at secondary schools in rural western Kenya, to examine their views on why girls absent themselves or dropout from school. Data were analysed thematically. Lack of resources, sexual relationships with boyfriends, and menstrual care problems were reported to lead directly to dropout or school absence. These were tied to girls increased vulnerability to pregnancy, poor performance in school, and punishments, which further increase school absence and risk of dropout. Poverty, unmet essential needs, coercive sexual relationships, and an inequitable school environment collude to counter girls’ resolve to complete their schooling. Lack of resources drive girls to have sex with boyfriends or men who provide them with essentials their family cannot afford, such as sanitary pads and transport to school. While these improve quality of their school life, this dynamic increases their exposure to sexual risk, pregnancy, punishment, and dropout. Evaluation of interventions to ameliorate these challenges is warranted, including provision of pocket money to address their needs.     

Learning the Moral Economy of Commodified Health Care: “Community Education,” Failed Consumers,and the Shaping of Ethical Clinician-Citizens

Leaders of health professional schools often support community-based education as a means of promoting emerging practitioners’ awareness of health disparities and commitment to serving the poor. Yet, most programs do not teach about the causes of health disparities, raising questions regarding what social and political lessons students learn from these experiences. This article examines the ways in which community-based clinical education programs help shape the subjectivities of new dentists as ethical clinician-citizens within the US commodified health care system. Drawing on ethnographic research during volunteer and required community-based programs and interviews with participants, I demonstrate three implicit logics that students learned: (1) dialectical ideologies of volunteer entitlement and recipient debt; (2) forms of justification for the often inferior care provided to “failed” consumers (patients with Medicaid or uninsured); and (3) specific forms of obligations characterizing the ethical clinician-citizen. I explore the ways these messages reflected the structured relations of both student encounters and the overarching health care system, and examine the strategies faculty supervisors undertook to challenge these messages and relations. Finally, I argue that promoting commitments to social justice in health care should not rely on cultivating altruism, but should instead be pursued through educating new practitioners about the lives of poor people, the causal relationships between poverty and poor health, and attention to the structure of health care and provider–patient interactions. This approach involves shining a critical light on America’s commodified health care system as an arena based in relations of power and inequality.     

Dropout typologies: Relating profiles of risk and support to later educational re-engagement

A large body of work has examined factors that push and pull youth to drop out. However, a relatively minimal amount of work has examined whether and how these factors cluster in individuals’ lives preceding or concurrent to leaving school. This study used Latent Class Analysis with a national sample (N?=?1,942) to examine how push, pull, and protective experiences clustered in the lives of individuals who left high school without graduating. Then, we asked how the resultant classes differentially predicted youth re-engagement in educational endeavors. We identified three classes: youth with the presence of protective factors and absence of push/pull factors (Quiet Dropouts), youth with the presence of protective factors and an abundance of push/pull factors (High Adversity), and youth with the presence of instability in factors related to social relationships and school or housing (Instability). Results indicated each profile differentially predicted youths’ re-engagement in education and achievement of educational outcomes.