The Reliable Beauty of Aroma: Staples of Food and Cultural Production among Italian‐Australians1

This paper takes an ethnographic journey into Italian‐Australian cultural production through an examination of the Italian term for both the flavour and taste of herbs, aroma. Here, I explore the ways in which staple foods and their commensalities engender staple cultural production without necessarily overdetermining the culture produced. Taking the material indeterminacy of culture as a theoretical starting point, I argue that this is the reliable beauty of aroma as well as is its capacity to capture the realities of culture as lived experience. When culture is approached from this direction, stature is returned to ethnographic subjects as people living lives rather than as automatons of cultural form. From this vantage, a theoretical preoccupation with order and structure may be seen to hinder rather than enhance an apprehension of ethnographic fact.     

Responsible choices: situating pregnancy intention among Haitians in South Florida

In this article, I focus on unintended pregnancy as a means to interrogate the intersections of abortion and prenatal discourses in the United States, and the ways in which these discourses assume certain kinds of moral, liberal subjects. Using media material, congressional legislation, public health policy, and ethnographic data from South Florida (2004-06), I trace how these discourses assume that women will behave in "rational," "responsible" ways to plan their reproductive futures, and how these assumptions intersect with Haitian women migrants' lived experiences in South Florida. My research illustrates how decisions about family planning are situated within particular local moral worlds, where gender relations, religion, power, and desires for children inform women's everyday lives.     

The discursive detachment of race from gentrification in Cartagena de Indias,Colombia

In this article, I provide an ethnographic account of the gentrification process and its relationship to race and racism in the community of Getsemaní in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I introduce Racial Attachment Processes as a conceptual framework for understanding how individuals reconcile Latin American discourses that suggest that race is not a primary stratifying principle with the material spatial realities of racial hierarchies that counter such discourses. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews, including those employing photo-elicitation, I demonstrate how people discursively mobilize race in everyday life, yet selectively detach race in ways that allow them to interpret processes of gentrification as untethered to their racial underpinnings. This paper ultimately demonstrates how the discursive detachment of race from understandings of Colombian socio-spatial, political and economic relations obscures the relationship between racial domination and social inequality.     

A Review of Hu Tai-li's Documentary Educational Resources Series

ABSTRACT  This review addresses six films made by Taiwan's most well respected ethnographic filmmaker, Hu Tai-li. The films were recently released as part of the Documentary Educational Resources series and cover Hu's most well-known works. The films in the series span two decades, beginning with her first film in 1985. Hu's films capture the everyday lives of the disenfranchised in Taiwan, ranging from aboriginal groups to working-class Taiwanese who have been displaced by shifting economic structures. Her films are especially important for Taiwan Studies, for they capture fading traditions as well as continued ethnic and class tensions within Taiwan. As such, the films are important for anyone who wants to come to a better understanding of Taiwan's past and present.     

The coproduction of moral discourse in U.S. community psychiatry

Anthropologists often criticize the discipline of bioethics because its remote, abstract theories fail to capture how front-line clinicians experience and resolve moral uncertainty. The critique overlooks, however, the ways that everyday, emergent moral discourse is influenced—over time and through several mediations—by formal ethical notions. High-order ethical pronouncements become sedimented into the conditions of work, illustrated in this article by a two-year ethnographic study of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), a popular mode of outpatient psychiatric services. ACT clinicians' moral unease when they break the confidentiality of patients is connected to high-order debates, dating back 35 years, about ensuring patients' autonomy without abandoning them. These debates originally spurred the invention of ACT, and they get braided into today's moral discourse through several mediations: regulatory paperwork, the mandates and micropolitics of staff–patient interactions, and the idealized self-image of front-line staff. This article shows how everyday moral talk is coproduced by both the immediate contexts of clinical work and the categories of formal bioethics.     

Community Life and Discourses among Fiji Islanders in Kantō, Japan

This article examines how Fiji Islanders of diverse ethnic backgrounds living in Japan's Kantō area reflect on and constitute community life in the diaspora. While they occasionally refer to the ‘community’ and speak about its social value, get-togethers of significant numbers occur infrequently. Ultimately, a Fijian-centred community is virtually absent in the everyday lives of Japan-based Fiji Islanders. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Tokyo Metropolis and its neighbouring prefectures, this contribution suggests that for Fiji Islanders in Kantō, talking about ‘community’ serves two particular purposes: on the one hand community discourses create an emotional bond, both among the migrants and between the migrants and their place of origin. At the same time, discourses on the relevance of the community without undergoing efforts to maintain it, serve as strategies of navigating self and belonging in a critical and reflexive way. As migrants’ social lives are complex and shaped by numerous economic, spatial, and individual disjunctures, Kantō Fiji Islanders contextually configure and extend their social relations with regard to their socio-cultural heritage, their place of residence in Japan, their gaikokujin (foreigner) status, and their life-work cycles.     

“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.     

Life on the hoof: gender,youth, and the environment in the Indian Himalayas

This article examines how young people in the Indian Himalayas understand, appreciate, and discuss their environment. Building on intensive ethnographic field research in Bemni, Uttarakhand, I point to the changing ways in which young people use the everyday practice of herding to acquire knowledge and engage in playful activity. I emphasize that age and gender shape the capacity for young people to interact creatively with their local environments. I will argue that studies of human/environment relations might usefully combine a focus on the movement of individuals through environments with a focus on the gendered ways in which they move through the life‐course.     

A Novel Approach to Tradition: Torres Strait Islanders and Ion Idriess

This paper considers the significance of the novel Drums of Mer (1941) in contemporary Torres Strait Islanders' lives. Its use as narrative by many Islanders today constitutes one means by which men especially have come to know themselves, white others, and their past. In particular, I explore the ways in which this story appeals to and is appealed to by Yam Island people. Contrary to literary deconstructions of Idriess's representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, my paper argues that in seriously attending to Torres Strait readings of Drums of Mer we can see that for contemporary Islander readers, it is not themselves who are other but rather the white protagonists. I employ Said's (1994) notion of ‘cultural overlap’ and de Certeau's (1988) understandings of reading and writing as ‘everyday practices’ to frame my analysis of the differing impacts of the historical novel, Drums of Mer, and the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. It is through story telling that Yam Island selves are placed in the past and the present, and in Idriess's memorable story a similar effect is achieved. In his novel approach, the past becomes his-story, a romanticised refraction of the Reports. Unlike the Reports, this novel is a sensual rendering of a Torres Strait past, and at this level it operates as a mnemonic device for Yam Island people, triggering memories and the imagination through the senses. This Torres Strait Islander detour by way of a past via a story, can be understood as a means by which Yam Island people continue to actively produce powerful images of themselves, for both themselves and for others.     

'Beyond being': emergent narratives of suffering in Vietnam

Intertwining ethnographic and literary accounts, this article explores the mutual relationship between suffering and agency. The article describes how young Vietnamese women use narrative to find meaning in the suffering that a late-term abortion causes. Seeking to further develop anthropological use of the concept of social suffering, the article argues that existing scholarship has tended to neglect the importance of human agency and imagination, hinging as it does on suffering as entrenched within structural forces. The article contends that this neglect must be understood in the context of the particular epistemological and ethical conditions under which anthropological studies of human suffering are produced, and that closer attention to the human engagements out of which ethnographic accounts are fashioned may bring into analysis not only the harm that social forces can inflict on people, but also their capacities for action and imagination.     

What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics★

A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study of the ways in which religion contributes to people's moral lives. After defining religion and transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These encounters, in turn, shape people's ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from Turner's Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.     

Comparative Epistemology: Contours of a Research Program

This article addresses the question whether and how literary documents can be used to further our understanding of a number of key issues on the agenda of the philosophy of biology such as “complexity” and “reductionism”. Kant already granted a certain respectability to aesthetical experiences of nature in his third Critique. Subsequently, the philosophical movement known as phenomenology often used literary sources and literary techniques to criticize and question mainstream laboratory science. The article discusses a number of literary documents, from Moby-Dick to Jurassic Park, that explicitly stage a confrontation between scientific and non-scientific ways of experiencing and understanding the natural world. Special attention is given to the work of Michael Crichton. Its relevance for the philosophy of biology is pointed out.     

The Life of Marble: The Experience and Meaning of Work in the Marble Quarries of Carrara

Based on ethnographic research in the marble quarries of Carrara in north Italy, this article offers an experiential interpretation of work and labour. Intended as a critique of more structurally determined accounts of the labour process, the article examines the ways in which the experience and meanings of work can be found in the domain of intersubjectivity, articulated both in the discursive practices and interactions of co-workers, as well as through the everyday embodied activity and lived experience of quarrying itself. The first section deals with the relationship between quarry workers and the natural environment. In the second section I explore the relationship between craft identity, the embodied experience of labour and collective narratives of masculinity.     

For my wellness, not just my illness: North Americans’ use of dietary supplements

Passage of the DSHEA in 1994 created a new “liminal” category for the FDA: dietary supplements are regulated as neither food nor drugs. However, there appears to be a significant disconnect between the “official” discourse surrounding dietary supplements and supplement users’ actual practices. Despite this discrepancy, and the inadequacy of surveys to capture the dynamics of pharmaceutical practice, there is little ethnographic information available on the ways that Americans think about or use dietary supplements. We offer some preliminary observations from a pilot ethnographic study of Americans’ use of dietary supplements in which we consider not only the reasons why people are using supplements, but how they are using them, and how their experimentation has been influenced by the information they seek and receive from a variety of sources. We illustrate how anthropological studies of supplement related practice can help us better understand Americans’ attraction to and use of dietary supplements, and suggest that anthropology can contribute to a more balanced perspective on supplement use—one that moves the study of supplements beyond surveys and randomized controlled studies of efficacy to considerations of patterns of use in context, user expectations, and measures of perceived effectiveness.     

Listening after the animals: sound and pastoral care in the zoo

In anthropology and across the humanities and social sciences, zoos have tended to be theorized as places of spectacle. Scholars often focus on the ways in which these institutions enable the viewing of other-than-human animals by human publics. This article, however, uses sound-focused ethnographic fieldwork to engage with two UK zoos and to describe a particular mode of cross-species listening which is enacted by zookeepers. The concepts of pastoral care and control discussed by Foucault and applied to the zoo context by Braverman are productively reworked and reorientated in order to understand this form of listening. The article also demonstrates the interconnectedness of keeper, visitor, and animal sound worlds, in the process generating an original perspective that complements and enriches conventional zoo studies.     

On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

‘Live has an atmosphere of its own’: azadari,ethical orientation,and tuned presence in Shi‘i media praxis

Among producers of Shi‘i Islamic media in Pakistan, the quality of being live as an atmosphere capable of mediation has gained efficacy along with changes in media for religious dispensation. Central to the importance of live recordings are the ways they are perceived to most effectively mediate the ethical, ritual, and transhistorical contours of azadari, a word that describes the ways in which the personages held in esteem by the Shi‘a are mourned and commemorated. What are these qualities of being live that see recordings attributed the qualities of a good, moral atmosphere? By building on ethnographic research into the relationship between Shi‘i practices of azadari and their technological mediation, this article aims to provide greater insights into what atmosphere can do for anthropology, with the suggestion that it acts as a way of recognizing different thresholds of intensity and change.     

Living in a World of Smart Everyday Objects—Social,Economic, and Ethical Implications

Visions of Pervasive Computing and ambient intelligence involve integrating tiny microelectronic processors and sensors into everyday objects in order to make them “smart.” Smart things can explore their environment, communicate with other smart things, and interact with humans, therefore helping users to cope with their tasks in new, intuitive ways. Although many concepts have already been tested out as prototypes in field trials, the repercussions of such extensive integration of computer technology into our everyday lives are difficult to predict. This article is a first attempt to classify the social, economic, and ethical implications of this development.     

"Interracial" Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?

Racial democracy is maintained in Brazil through both scholarly and popular discourses that consider "interracial" sex as proof of Brazil's lack of a racial problem. In this article, I scrutinize the discourse that asks, "How can we be racist when so many of us are mixed?" I argue that racial discourses are embedded in everyday interactions, but are often codified or masked. "Race" is especially pertinent to sexuality, yet the two have hardly been analyzed together. In fact, it is not the belief in a racial democracy that is at the heart of Brazilian racial hegemony, but rather the belief that Brazil is a color-blind erotic democracy. Using my ethnographic data, I illustrate that "race" is embodied in everyday valuations of sexual attractiveness that are gendered, racialized, and class-oriented in ways that commodity black female bodies and white male economic, racial, and class privilege. [Brazil, race, sexuality, poverty]     

Escaping identity: border zones as places of evasion and cultural reinvention

The article, based on in‐depth ethnographic research in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez area, is concerned with the ways in which liminal border zones become places of cultural transformation in which groups of individuals, rather than synthetically blending two or more identities, may attempt to downplay potentially harmful or restrictive uni‐dimensional identities, evade past lives, and re‐create themselves anew. The argument is twofold: the relative separation and distance of borderlands from national structures allows for a degree of cultural agency that may be less available to individuals closer to centres of cultural and political power; and border zones provide possibilities for reinvention, new relationalities, and other cultural creations and constructions that I call ‘escaping identity’.