Introduction
Within the past two decades, planetary computerization, burgeoning media industries, and other global processes have significantly altered the ways in which individuals experience local and global, interdependent, cultural communities. Individuals, and the emerging or dissolving communities to which they belong, enter dialogical, often paradoxical relations. While scholars from many fields question these life changes, this anthology demonstrates the vitality and relevance of psychocultural...
Witchcraft and Sorcery
Seeking some endogenous understanding of lethal bewitchment, primarily among blood relatives in Bantu African contexts, this chapter is concerned with the captivating intercorporeal and intersubjective transactional dynamics mobilized between a victim and the suspected aggressor's congenital capacity for fatal attack. It focuses on the prereflective consciousness at play in the skin, the flesh, the senses, the belly , as a magma of forces of abjection, transgression, and annihilation gradually...
Time and Consciousness
This chapter explores the cultural ideas of time and the experience of time in the context of globalization. Time is a cultural creation, but one that encompasses embodied experiences of circadian cycles as well as learned and shared ideas about power and social relationships. In addition, concepts of time are cognitive tools for orienting and coordinating people and relationships. Since concepts of time link a diversity of physical and social experiences, cultures do not manifest single...
The Politics of Remorse
This chapter treats the politically and morally ambiguous task of recording the experience of violence and truth-telling from the point of view of a small cross-section of white South Africans. Their narratives of suffering, remorse, and reconciliation reflect the experiences of ordinary people existentially thrown into a political drama in which they participate as active collaborators, passive beneficiaries, or revolutionary race traitors vis- -vis the apartheid state. Today, they are trying...
An Anthropology of Emotion
This chapter outlines the historical background and theoretical premises of the study of emotion in the social sciences. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that universal motivating emotions exist, although these are largely shaped by the constraints of culture, history, and structure. Repression of fundamental emotions leads to their expression in disguised forms. Future studies of emotion ought to be comparative, and focus on the manner in which destructive collective emotions can be curbed...
Race Local Biology and Culture in Mind
This chapter considers concepts of race from several perspectives psychological and medical anthropology, cultural history, psychoanalysis, and the Cultural Studies of Science. From these perspectives, it views race as cultural and psychological constructs, as professional medical and scientific constructs, and in the contexts of racial justifications and psychological defenses. The chapter focuses on medical and scientific discursive formations of race in the United States, since social racial...
Genocide and Modernity
This chapter maintains that, as opposed to being an aberration or a regression to a state of barbarism, genocide is powerfully influenced by modernity. Reflecting on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, the chapter argues psychological anthropology provides an important and distinct vantage on the interconnection between genocide and modernity, illustrating how modern genocides, while unfolding within particular cultural contexts, involve issues of identity, motivation, upheaval and revitalization,...
References
Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambeck, 1996 Tense Past Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun, 2001 Globalization. Durham, NC Duke University Press. Bakhtin, M. M., 1981 Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Michael E. Holquist, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin University of Texas Press. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press. Benedict, Ruth 1946 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword...
Practical Logic and Autism
This chapter examines the practice-based paradigms of Bourdieu and Garfinkel, specifically the relation between structure and agency, through the prism of autism. It is argued that practical logic is not a homogeneous domain of competence, as it presents degrees of complexity when applied to the flow of local and extended actions and expressed implicated propositions. The practical proclivities of children with autism illuminate the primacy of structure over improvisation.
Disability Global Languages and Local Lives
This chapter proposes a pragmatic approach to the study of global discourses on disability. Like many languages of misfortune, these languages offer hope, but do so in contexts where opportunity is socially patterned. Analyzing disability discourses suggests that problems are defined in terms of the solutions being offered. Analyzing the pragmatics of empirical situations shows that discourses of disability are unevenly relevant to people in different positions. We cannot assume that discourse...
Immigrant Identities and Emotion
The inbetweenness of those who migrate is not easily captured in the models that dominate the anthropology of emotions. This chapter examines situations in which this inbetweenness is foregrounded the medical clinic, where many migrants seek help in managing the stresses of migration the emotional structurings of the memory of home and the relationships between first and second generations, in which emotional structures and identities are transmitted across a gulf of cultural difference.
Culture and Learning
Over the last forty years, concepts of culture and learning have moved from strict and separate operational definitions to integrations of these concepts as they are used within the fields of psychological anthropology and developmental psychology. Culture and learning have become cultural learning, and cultural learning is fast becoming part and parcel of developmental psychology. At the same time, the domain of culture and learning is no longer contextualized in separate and timeless cultures...
Effort After Meaning in Everyday Life
A process oriented perspective of cognition need not limit the cultural contribution to content, or the process merely to biochemical cognitive processes. Rather, it can highlight cultural-historical and social processes as well as the range of artifacts and culturally available resources for effort after meaning while advancing an understanding of variation and change in cultural settings. The constructive and situated nature of knowing is explored through the distributed nature of cognition,...
Self and Other in an Amodern World
This chapter reviews the major assumptions about culture and identity that have shaped the fields of social and psychological anthropology. Beginning with philosophical questions about ideological commensurability and incommensurability - that is, are different embodied practices exclusive - the chapter goes on to examine the degree to which contemporary anthropologists may have silenced this discussion, not only by failing to admit to the potential importance of learning about new domains of...
Part III Ambivalence Alienation and Belonging
11 Self and Other in an Amodern World 201 A. David Napier 12 Immigrant Identities and Emotion 225 Katherine Pratt Ewing 13 Emotive Institutions 241 14 Urban Fear of Crime and Violence in Gated Communities 255 Setha M. Low 15 Race Local Biology and Culture in Mind 274 Atwood D. Gaines 16 Unbound Subjectivities and New Biomedical Technologies 298 Margaret Lock 17 Globalization, Childhood, and Psychological Anthropology 315 Thomas S. Weisner and Edward D. Lowe 18 Drugs and Modernization 337...
Identity
Contemporary studies of identity focus on emergent gender, ethnic, and transnational identities, simultaneously engaging sharp debates within anthropology over the nature and locus of meaning. This chapter explores controversies over the instability and proliferation of identities, arguing that significant future work requires continued elaboration of a model of the person. Such a model is a theoretical precondition of all approaches to meaning, all attempts to link public and private domains,...
Memory and Modernity
This chapter reviews the relationship of memory to modernity, arguing that the experience of modernity has both increased scholarly and popular interest in memory and shaped the study of memory in problematic ways by separating the analysis of individual memory from that of social memory. Arguing for the importance of viewing memory as a key site at which to examine the complex interplay of individual and social experience, the chapter reviews social psychological and anthropological approaches...
Emotive Institutions
This chapter explores the social and cultural character of emotion, outlining a model for comparative ethnographic research on the meaning and force of emotions in everyday life. After briefly reviewing differences between psychological and anthropological approaches to the social dimensions of emotion, the chapter introduces the idea of emotive institution as a means of focusing attention on the role of cultural models, social context, and social relational factors in producing emotional...