ABSTRACT: For Brazil's Indigenous peoples, the threat of COVID-19 not only evoked the genocide caused by the spread of diseases brought by Europeans during the period of colonial conquest, but was immediately interpreted as entangled with the political threats to which they were subjected, especially during the years of the 2019-2022 right wing government. Collaborative research conducted in the Xakriabá Indigenous Lands in the state of Minas Gerais has revealed the extent to which the underreporting of epidemiological contagion data by federal government agencies is interpreted by Indigenous peoples as yet another part of a strategy aimed at ridding the national territory of their presence. In response to this threat, Brazil's Indigenous movement has gone beyond acts of denunciation, independently organizing collection and dissemination of epidemiological data on infected Indigenous people through social networks. Ethnographic research has allowed us to understand how actions and strategies employed specifically by the Xakriabá can contribute to the debate on "data activism" (the emerging field concerned with the political use of data by social movements). For the Xakriabá, such actions have in fact acquired specific meaning and connotations, ranging from political resistance to the use of data in internal decision-making, as well as emerging as an important collective learning tool within the community. Faced with yet another threat to their lives and territories, the Xakriabá reacted by collecting and disseminating data about themselves as a community of practitioners (or a community of learning in practice). In doing so, they mobilized decolonial epistemological "disobedience" strategies within a liberatory perspective, challenging a dominant model of knowledge management that was not only totally exclusionary but also complicit in maintaining necropolitical forms of governance.
ABSTRACT: This article explores how mediatization is integral to the recent spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Vietnam—what we call Tibeto-Vietnamese Vajrayana (TVV). The popular tropes of this newly-forming religiosity—wealth- and health-attracting, beauty-inspiring, and status-imbuing—reflect changes in late-socialism, including digitally-mediated forms of transnational spiritual alternativity and consumer subjectivity. To substantiate this claim, we draw on 15 months of ethnographic research between 2018-24. The primary case study examines the Vajrastar Tinna Tình and the digital niche she has created for Vajrahotties, microcelebrities who commingle Tibetan Buddhism with lifestyle brands, physical beauty and market capitalization on social media platforms. Their influence is evident among young, urban elites (and aspiring elites) who prefer in vogue cyber-Buddhism over the perceived traditionalism of state-regulated Vietnamese Buddhism. Analysis extends the "media turn" in religion away from theologies and institutions and towards lived practice.
Not all sacred pilgrimages are far-flung, once-in-a-lifetime, or extraordinary. Some pilgrimages are local, routine, and mundane. Scholarly literature examining the former kind of pilgrimage has blurred the supposed boundaries between pilgrim and tourist, enabling a flourishing of literature focused on religious tourism. My research, on the other hand, argues that attending to the latter kind of pilgrimage enables a similar blurring of boundaries-this time between pilgrim and resident. Based on fieldwork conducted in a small, rural, Latter-day Saint (LDS) community in Canada that is home to an LDS temple, I demonstrate that the desire to live close to a temple, in order to enable routine attendance, factors prominently in Latter-day Saints' decisions about where to live. In this, the resident-pilgrims impact the viability and stability of the resident economy. Consequently, this essay's arguments are two-fold. First, that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) practice regular, routinized pilgrimage in the form of temple attendance. Second, that the experiences of pilgrims living close to these pilgrimage sites problematize the seemingly discrete categories: pilgrim vs. resident. This research contributes to an emerging anthropology of Mormonism attentive to the LDS Church in its globalized contexts. It also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of pilgrimage-one which becomes accessible only through anthropological inquiry premised on observant participation in the local, routine, and mundane aspects of religious life. [Keywords: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism, pilgrimage, economic anthropology, lived religion, religious tourism]
Bear ceremonialism has been identified as a core cultural feature of circumpolar indigenous communities since Hallowell (1926). Ethnographies have usually described bear ceremonies as a '"script" of component events that provide a generalizable plan of enactment, but such strategies can never tell us how these individual components fulfill their functions. This article uses original video documentation to examine Siberian bear ceremonies as performances, focusing on the performance of a single element of the typical Eastern Khanty multi-day ceremony, the Yepykh skit. Singling out this particular component provides the first extended look at sexual humor in bear ceremonies, locating it in a broader ethnographic and historical context of ritual clowning and theoretical discussions of ritual clowning and the grotesque, while highlighting its distinctive character and significance for the eastern Khanty. Our analysis demonstrates how the Yepykh skit functions performatively, in both organizational and symbolic terms, to dramatize a vital but overlooked dimension of eastern Khanty bear ceremonialism, the necessarily uncomfortable linkage of sexual excess and hunting violence. The Yepykh skit helps to account for historical persistence of bear ceremonialism among the eastern Khanty by reaffirming the truth that the bear that kills and the bear that dies is the Bear that feeds us and perpetuates us as a Khanty community.
This article examines the dynamics of relationships between humanitarian reception workers and refugees and asylum seekers within the context of economic precarity and job insecurity in Spain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a non-governmental organization (NGO) implementing the official refugee reception program in Madrid, I argue that the precarious situations of NGO workers influenced and informed their interactions with forced migrants, particularly those from privileged backgrounds in their countries of origin. Workers attempted to "manage" the expectations of such individuals as a way of bringing them in line with the realities they would face in Spain, justifying such actions as necessary to prepare refugees for life after the reception program. However, this practice contributed to the maintenance of existing structural inequalities in Spanish society as all refugees and asylum seekers were encouraged to pursue and occupy low-wage labor positions, regardless of their professional experience, levels of education, and career interests.
In the Outer Banks, the land is always in motion. These barrier islands off North Carolina's coast migrate and erode. Infrastructure is precarious and overdevelopment is exacerbated by frequent storms and sea-level rise. The Banks is also a broadly Christian place, especially among inter-generational families. Focusing on Hatteras Island, this article explores how time is experienced amid ecological instability. My analysis suggests that Outer Bankers live within two major temporalities, which I call intermittent and linear time, each of which is entangled with morally resonant ideas about progress and modernity. Intermittent time, the older of the two, is anchored in relations with God and shaped by the destructive and recreative environment on a volatile coast. This traditional form of future-thinking is not anti-capitalist, but it does capitalism differently, offering a speculative possibility for redressing unsustainable development.
Based on long-term ethnographic research in central Tanzania, this paper focuses on Pentecostal/Charismatic practices of spiritual warfare. Most Pentecostals/Charismatics possess a detailed, albeit sometimes fragmented, knowledge about different categories of spirits that belong to the Devil's team. At the same time, participation in spiritual warfare is also, and foremost, a question of acquiring a set of sensibilities, dispositions, and embodied skills for taking action against spiritual adversaries. I draw on phenomenological thinkers (such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) as well as on a body of anthropological scholarship that, in part inspired by phenomenology, has shown how religious socialization revolves around different modes of knowing and learning about otherworldly forces. I show how participation in deliverance sessions in churches is a process through which Pentecostals/Charismatics cultivate certain alertness to the presence of spiritual adversaries as well as a ritual mastery that involves experiencing their own bodies as channels from which divine power can be transmitted. I further show how spiritual warfare prayers are taken into a variety of everyday situations and contexts where spiritual adversaries sometimes present themselves, not as objects of thought, but rather as practical problems that are ready-to-handle with an automated bodily response.
In 2010, the Environmental Working Group announced that Norman, Oklahoma's tap water had the highest levels in the nation of what it called the "Erin Brockovich Chemical" - hexavalent chromium. Erin Brockovich famously investigated Pacific Gas & Electric's contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium. For many Norman residents, the Erin Brockovich Chemical immediately established a narrative of industrial pollution, cancer clusters, and government coverups. The encounter between the Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative and the city of Norman's struggles with hexavalent chromium complicates scholarly understandings of toxic uncertainty. Scholars have documented the intentional production of toxic uncertainty-the creation of doubt about the health implications of contaminants that companies rely on for profit. The Erin Brockovich Chemical narrative, however, reveals an additional dimension of uncertainty that is rooted in expectations of contamination. The Norman case demonstrates that NGOs, bloggers, and environmental activists also contribute to toxic uncertainty by advancing powerful narratives about industrial contamination. City of Norman employees advanced a counter-narrative, noting that Norman's tap water meets Environmental Protection Agency regulations and hexavalent chromium occurs naturally in the local aquifer, but this did little to create confidence in the city's tap water. As I researched Norman's water supply, I increasingly struggled to reach any form of certainty regarding the toxicity of hexavalent chromium in the tap water. The film Erin Brockovich offers surprising clues about how to alleviate this uncertainty by drawing attention to how toxic uncertainty is related to the struggle to care for others. In a context of late industrialism in which trust in state expertise has significantly eroded, Erin Brockovich demonstrates that access to care can provide the time to research, organize, and engage in policy debates.
In the early 1950s, Phan Kh & ocirc;i (1887-1959), a classically trained but reform-minded Vietnamese modernizer, participated in several re-education (chinh huan) courses designed to correct the problematic perspectives of petit-bourgeois intellectuals and artists. In the self-examination reports he wrote at the conclusion of each course, Phan Kh & ocirc;i adopted a critical meta-perspective, a vantage point from which to survey and evaluate the perspectival commitments (of, for instance, "subjectivism," "liberalism," "narrow-mindedness") implicated in his pre-revolutionary writings. In the Vietnamese context, both the problematic perspectives from which revolutionaries attempted to liberate themselves, and the critical meta-perspective that they sought to inhabit, were named and, I suggest, en-registered as relatively stable configurations of entextualizing signs and communicative practice that could be recognized, learned, taught, and, when taken on, would effectively structure collective self-consciousness in determinate ways. In this essay, then, I analyze re-education classes as an institutionalized activity of perspectival reform and describe some aspects of perspectival enregisterment upon which this activity was premised. More generally, I contend that a consideration of Phan Kh & ocirc;i's end-of-course reports indicates that, for Vietnamese communists, perspective emerged as a profoundly political matter, conceptualized as both a means to and an end of revolutionary action.
Vision gets a bad rap, largely because of the ways it has been recruited into western philosophical and cultural projects of objectivity and domination and then repudiated by their critics (Jay 1993). Accordingly, common metaphors of perspective unfold in just this problem-space of subjective location and object-knowledge: whatI see from where Iam. If such notions of perspective position vision as a self-defining abstraction from the visual signal, then this paper argues for an expanded and realistic approach- one that re-inscribes the moving/seeing body within its ambient environment-yielding a notion of perspective as process and ground for registering the presence of others. This paper draws on ethnographic scenes from hospitality interactions in the Dhofar mountains of Oman to track how the infrastructural reorganizations of the built and social landscape that incorporated Sehret speakers into the modern state refigure visibility and participation in everyday gatherings at the home. Through Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson's theories of vision, this paper explores the role of moving and seeing in practices organizing engagement and participation in hospitality interactions, foregrounding movement as a useful ethnographic horizon for both linguistic anthropologies of interaction and broader inquiries into perception. [Keywords: perspective, perception, movement, environmental psychology, phenomenology, interaction, domestic space, semiotics]
In addition to providing an overview of the papers of this special issue, this introduction theorizes perspective as a semiotic, and thus political, phenomenon for sociocultural and linguistic anthropological study. As we argue, despite the term being closely linked to visualist and spatialist conceptions (if "extended" in capacious ways to diverse phenomena), perspective is best thought of as equally at play in all types of semiosis; as such, we ask how different modalities and media, from visual images in film to oral speech and written literature to face-to-face interaction and architecture, are underwritten by a common semiotics of perspective. Following Peirce and his uptake in linguistic anthropology, we distinguish and articulate perspective as an intrinsic function of the sign relation (as interpretant), as an emergent discourse-level precipitate (as entextualized), and as the result of inter-discursive processes of conventionalization and institutionalization (as enregistered). In doing so, we stress the capacity of perspective to itself become an object of reflexive focus, and thus of political action and authority (contestation, naturalization, reform). [Keywords: perspective, linguistic anthropology, semiotics, entextualization, enregisterment]
linguistic forms once associated with insurgency were gradually reframed as fragile relics of the past. This process ultimately serves the interests of dominant groups, neutralizing former political threats while simultaneously providing a platform for resistance and identity affirmation among marginalized communities. By attending to the politics of perspective, this article sheds light on the ways in which language, place, and identity are continually reconfigured through ideological work, shaping the conditions under which minority languages are remembered, revitalized, and repurposed in the present.
The notion of perspective has long been used as a visual metaphor for tury, philosophers, scientists and other experts began rejecting the idea that their knowledge is perspectival and sought instead to eliminate perspective from their practices to gain an ideal of "objectivity" formulated as impartiality and impersonality. Starting with a semiotic analysis that identifies objectivity/subjectivity as an axis of differentiation in past ideologies, this article shows how current arguments about "objectivity" in politics and everyday life in Europe and the United States rely on erasures, as in the tional erasure, and denials of expertise-that produce authority in several social domains of decision-making through the achievement of what parintertwine objectivity and subjectivity to produce authority in novel ways.
