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This article describes how particular emotions map figuratively onto body parts in Australian Indigenous languages. While most languages use expressions involving body parts to talk about emotions—as in “broken‐hearted,” for instance—Australian Indigenous languages do it to a remarkable extent. After identifying the figurative tropes—metaphors and metonymies—that recur most frequently in such expressions...
This article develops a cultural theory of those dreams with rich imagery and developed plots that are likely to be dreamt in rapid‐eye‐movement sleep. Such dreams, it argues, are an instance of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “deep play.” For Geertz, deep play is play with “an image … a model, a metaphor” that makes visible fundamental cultural structures. Image metaphors for cultural...
This paper proposes a novel perspective for thinking about ideophones, which are imitative words that communicate sensory perceptions and emotions with linguistic sounds and with so‐called “paralinguistic” features, especially gesture and intonation. By considering their performative and depictive qualities with concepts from mindfulness and meditative practices, it is argued that a contemplative,...
Ethnographers engaged in fieldwork with people who are dying face particular demands concerning the nature and limits of their relationships. Drawing on case studies of two patients in the United Kingdom affected by ultimately fatal brain cancer and bowel cancer, we elaborate on the concept of ethnographic sensibility. We highlight the continual attunement of capacities that guide our participation...
Rural‐to‐urban migrants in China have often been portrayed as striving subjects, living in “suspension” for the sake of the entrepreneurial futures they desire. Drawing on fieldwork conducted alongside young café workers in Shanghai, this article highlights more ambivalent engagements with the future obscured by emphases, within the social sciences, on the intentional, active aspects of subjectivity...
Bronislaw Malinowski suggested nearly a century ago that a key purpose of religious engagement is to provide a sense of stability in the face of uncertainty. This close relationship between religion and stability is often presumed by scholars today, but, we argue, it is not as universal as is often supposed. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research in Northern Thailand, we show how Thai Buddhists...
During Yemenite Jews’ stay in Israeli transit camps during 1948–1950, many of their children disappeared in the so‐called “Yemenite Children Affair,” undermining the immigrants’ faith in the redemptive ethos of Zionism. To better understand this collective trauma, we return to the original Freudian conceptualization of melancholia as “failed mourning,” locating it within the ethnographic context of...
Is selfhood socially constituted and distributed? Although the view has recently been defended by some cognitive scientists, it has long been popular within anthropology and cultural psychology. Whereas older texts by Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Hazel Rose Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama often contrast a Western conception of a discrete, bounded, and individual self with a non‐Western sociocentric...
This article discusses an ethnographic theater project designed to explore how social performances of gender and disability shape the experiences of those with Turner syndrome, a genetic condition causing short stature and infertility. Working alongside two interlocutors with the condition, our rehearsals demonstrate subjectivity to be an ethical, relational, and generative practice of striving for...
What is it like to know and be known by other creatures? And when do people place ethical importance on knowing or being known by other creatures in particular ways? This article brings ethnography of British equestrianism into dialogue with anthropological inquiries into the cultural variability of intersubjective understanding. I will show that riders’ desire for authentic mutual understanding with...
Researchers have observed high rates of recovery from first episode psychosis in some cultural settings. This study explores the course and long‐term outcome of a small set of cases of first episode psychoses, focusing on clinical predictors of outcome and local cultural processes supporting recovery in Javanese society in Indonesia. Researchers followed nine individuals with a first episode of psychosis...
During COVID‐19 stay‐at‐home orders (SaHOs), people faced drastic shifts in their work and home lives. These shifts, in combination with the temporary closure of gyms and fitness centers, led to exercise‐routine disruption. We conducted a survey to assess how people were affected by SaHOs in terms of exercise‐routine change, feelings about exercise, perceived physical and mental health, as well as...
This article is based on fieldwork we each conducted with refugees in Berlin between 2016 and 2021. We were both puzzled by our interlocutors’ repeated professed desires to leave Germany, often when their lives here were improving. We wondered how they could possibly fantasize about repeating the experiences of their initial flight, which were deeply wounding and traumatic. We argue against a reading...
This article theorizes chronic crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their young adult child diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Grounded in five years’ attendance at a support group for families living with BPD and interviews with parents, the article asks: In the era of deinstitutionalization of those with mental illness, what are the moral/ethical...
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