This article follows local discussions of stories and events tied to a particular graveyard to investigate the complex relationship between Christian belief and narratives of ghosts on Epoon in the Marshall Islands. Through ethnographic exploration, it reveals how local stories about the graveyard serve as a lens via which to understand divergent beliefs among ri-Epoon. Some narratives embrace the idea of the graveyard as dangerous, others express scepticism, while many others remain agnostic, reflecting a broader ambivalence regarding the unknown. Engaging with recent and canonical works in anthropology, this article addresses the problem of translation and critiques the recent anthropological dismissal of the notion of belief. Instead, it explores the dialectical interplay between belief and doubt to show how, for ri-Epoon, moments of ghostly interference reaffirm the power of God while simultaneously exposing inherent cosmological uncertainties. In this article, I argue that an analytical recognition of contradictory beliefs presents a more honest understanding of local cosmologies and challenges anthropologists to follow the tensions inherent in these beliefs. Here, I advocate for embracing uncertainty in anthropological analysis, arguing that this approach enriches our comprehension of cultural dynamics.
While the anthropological scholarship on violence has extensively explored which factors shape our writing, the role of academic interactions as censors remains underexplored. This article addresses this gap by examining how peer interactions act as disciplinary censorship and shape the ways anthropologists write and speak about violence. Drawing on Dominic Boyer’s (2003) understanding of censorship as a productive intellectual practice, I analyse two early-career encounters in which I experienced being censored in 1) the role of emotions in my analysis of violence, and 2) my focus on researching so-called perpetrators of violence as a woman. I argue that these episodes reveal patterned mechanisms of disciplinary governance that produce what Price (2019) terms ‘disciplinary silences’ around violence and define the boundaries of acceptable anthropological knowledge. By theorising disciplinary censorship as a constitutive feature of anthropological practice, this article contributes to broader discussions on knowledge production, academic precarity, and the ethics of scholarly care.
The current moment is witnessing a range of human-made problems, the consequences of which are felt most by those who have contributed the least to them. Institutional arrangements still prioritise a model of limitless growth. Drawing on pluriversal politics in this article, I argue that anticolonial artistic practices can offer tools to support post-growth transformations by creating spaces for alternative modes of being and doing that challenge the logics of separation. Here, I provide an examination of artistic methods used in workshops led by dancer Ana Kavalis and visual artist Rosamaría Bolom, respectively, through embodied participant observation. Both artists used different sensory techniques intended to expand the notion of the body into a collective, relational entity. Ana Kavalis’s workshop, Corpo Migrante: Corpo Ressonante (‘Migrant Body: Resonant Body’), encouraged bodily contemplation of how one perceives the world, while Rosamaría Bolom’s workshop, Corpas Que Voam (‘Bodies That Fly’), demonstrated how convivial collective spaces that use acuerpamiento provide autonomous ways to challenge power. I conclude this article arguing that the anthropologist’s sensory approach is broadly urgent for facilitating transformative change.
The natural environment has long been treated as an important part of the setting for social life, but buildings have only rarely been the focus of anthropological attention. It is time to engage more actively with the changes in the built environment brought about by recent shifts in global geographies of power. This paper is inspired by anthropological research on environmental perception in a broadly phenomenological research tradition, which emphasizes the embodied aspects of knowledge. Unfortunately, among anthropologists as well as architectural theorists, this approach tends to reproduce an unjustified contrast between the seemingly traditional world it conjures up and the kinds of abstractions often associated with the modern city. Given that the modern city presents inhabitants with straight lines, bureaucratic abstractions and, importantly, vast amounts of textual and visual information, these features should also feature in anthropological analysis. Using Helsinki as an illustration, the paper argues that a city is read and negotiated through abstract knowledge combined with embodied experience. The cultural representations that accompany dramatic change, e.g. place marketing materials, are part of the ethnographic focus and are analysed in connection with material and social obduracy.
Tammisto, Tuomas. 2024. Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-29
