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To explore the relationship between traditional healers and conventional psychotherapy, we conducted a combined ethnographic study and structured observational rating of healers in the middle hill region of central Nepal. We conducted in‐depth interviews and ethnographic observations of healing with 84 participants comprising 29 traditional healers and 55 other community members. Overall, our observations...
We present a new account of the cognitive commitments at stake in animist epistemologies. We use field‐based cognitive experiments to contribute to anthropological theories of the new animism, focusing on concepts of nonhuman agency afforded on one animist framework, that of the Ngöbe of Panama. Results from multiple studies using converging methods indicate that Ngöbe individuals have access to an...
This article explores a religious community in Algeria where, with the ignition and structure of ritual music, a wide spectrum of trance processes are explicitly cultivated so that pain and suffering can be engaged, moved, and expressed through trance dancing. The way that trance is described in dīwān indicates that it is understood as emerging primarily from the realms of feelings, particularly the...
Lawson and McCauley's ritual form hypothesis (RFH) appeals to natural cognition to capture several commonly observed features of religious rituals in one explanatory theory: (1) their repetition in the life of a participant tends to be distributed in bipolar fashion (typically only once in a lifetime or repeatedly, on the order of annually, monthly, weekly, or even daily); (2) their effects may or...
Social conditions shape health and health disparities. However, inquiry and intervention in the social determinants of health all too often rests on thin engagement with customary demographic correlates and predictors rather than robust, empirically and theoretically informed engagement with health and health disparity as biocultural phenomena—the integrated product of structure, materiality, and...
Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, this article examines Chinese preschool children's tattling behavior as well as educators’ interpretations of it. Tattling is defined as the reporting to an authority figure of other children's counternormative behavior. My research revealed distinctive characteristics of tattling in the Chinese context: the popularity of third‐party (bystander)...
In this article, I use the concept of the dividual to analyze the dynamics at stake in a family caring for a member with early‐onset dementia. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the Netherlands, I argue that using a dividual framework reveals family dynamics that are overlooked when using an individual framework, and it allows one to better understand the emotional pain that family members experience...
A major sphere of action in which parents engage in the management of risk on behalf of their children—primarily through the gendered work of mothering—is that of education and schooling. This article explores the endeavors on the part of middle‐class Israeli mothers hailing from three social‐cultural groups—immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Palestinian Israelis, and Jewish Israelis—to manage...
This article deals with the cultural idiom Notq—the remembering and talking about a previous incarnation among the Druze. The study focuses on the interface between the dominant Western psychological perspective and the Druze ethnopsychology. Sixteen Druze therapists including social workers and psychologists were interviewed about the Notq and how it arises in the clinic. The research shows that...
Drawing on prevalent Euro‐American folk models, extant theories of envy in the social sciences tend to reduce it to an emotion embodied in individual subjects, who are believed to envy those who have more and those who are hierarchically superordinate. Yet envy can also be viewed as a social, intersubjective phenomenon—one potentially incorporating humans and various other‐than‐human entities into...
In his 1995 ethnography Inside The Cult, Harvey Whitehouse argued that theorists have not been able to construct a satisfactory picture of religious behavior because they overlook “the way in which religion is handled cognitively” (1995, 194–220). In this essay, we will argue that, although Whitehouse's cognitive theory of “modes of religiosity” helps to explain many of the features and underlying...
In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with 10 families in Luzhou as part of a larger multisited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the grandmother‐mother‐baby triad model of infant care...
Although religious worship was banned during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), spiritual practices are once again flourishing in Cambodia. These include both the practices of the majority Buddhist population and a small but visible Cham Muslim minority. While popular Buddhism in Cambodia today incorporates the legacies of Hinduism and animism in the country, the majority of Cham Muslims have adopted...
Is an experience the private matter of an inner individual self? The phantasmicide committed by Laxmi in Sinja, Nepal, with the assistance of his uncle suggests otherwise. The perception of a wandering spirit in Nepal, like that of a dragon in the Middle Ages, demonstrates how subjective experiences may sometimes acquire independence in the blurred margins where reality merges with imagination. This...
When the artificial is natural: reconsidering what bionics and sensoria do.
Videos of cochlear implant (CI) activation are common on online platforms such as YouTube, presenting activation as a “magical” moment when people receive “the gift of hearing.” We argue that these videos present a distorted understanding of what bionic devices, specifically CIs, do. Our research focuses on the scientific...
Across diverse societies, task assignment is a socialization practice that gradually builds children's instrumental skills and integrates them into the flow of daily activities in their community. However, psychosocial tensions can arise when cooperation is demanded from children. Through their compliance or noncompliance, they learn cultural norms and values related to autonomy and obligations to...
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