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This paper develops a relational framework to interpret ethnographic data on the way residents of a community‐owned estate in the Western Isles of Scotland evaluated and contributed to collective quality of life. The analysis compares conversations with community development professionals and crofters to identify social and cultural structures influencing their contrasting interpretations of locally...
Gratitude is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday social interactions, yet it has received relatively little attention within anthropology. Past approaches to gratitude have focused on its practical expressions within exchange relationships. In contrast, this article considers the phenomenology of gratitude as a moral mood. Drawing on ethnographic episodes of gratitude between older care‐recipients...
This book review essay tries to bring together two extremely pivotal books to understand how we can reimagine dominant modes of communication and how debunking the normative ideas surrounding it helps us to cognize personhood and intersubjectivity better. Michele Friedner's ‘Sensory Futures’ and Wolf‐Meyer's ‘Unraveling’ are both critical attempts that try to understand how the sensory and neurological...
Drawing on linguistic and biocultural anthropological perspectives on embodiment, this paper advances a “biolinguistic” approach to ethnographic research on intimacy, attending simultaneously to the co‐constitutive interactive, psychophysiological, and phenomenological processes that emerge in everyday embodied interaction between long‐term, cohabitating romantic partners. Through concurrent attention...
In this essay, I introduce an analytic of atmosphere as a way to bridge the gap between the phenomenology of the felt‐body and the anthropology of the senses. This analytic of atmospheres as multisensoriality partially aligns with, but also differs from other anthropological approaches to multisensoriality or the anthropology of the senses. Examining the meaningfulness of atmospheres as spatially...
Parenting practices are inherently related to the sociocultural and material contexts in which children and their caregivers live. Rooted in sociocultural perspectives, this research contributes to the study of contextualized caregiving by ethnographically examining the daily caregiving practices of seven low‐income immigrant mothers and their young children. Research participants all live in a precarious...
This empirical study builds upon prior research concerning cultural influences on spatial mental representations in Oceania. A comprehensive examination of 93 mental maps sourced from 59 lagoon fishers of Moorea (French Polynesia) reveals interesting facts about the way they organize and share their spatial knowledge. Firstly, consistent with previous studies across Oceania, Polynesian fishers exhibit...
This article explores the relationship between schizophrenia, divine encounters, and therapeutics based on ethnographic research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Contributing to a long history of single‐subject ethnographies in psychological anthropology, this article narrates the events leading up to the diagnosis and the emerging life worlds post‐diagnosis of an interlocutor I call Dhruv. I depart...
Psychology has tended to conceptualize loneliness as a lack of intimate and social relationships. This analysis draws on the journal entries of 100 participants in the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP; a research study and online journaling platform that invited participants to chronicle their experiences during the COVID‐19 pandemic) to illustrate a more foundational sense of loneliness as a lack...
Practices occupy the intersection of human behavior with its personal and societal dimensions, operating in social theory as bridges between high‐order cultural features and on‐the‐ground dynamics that reciprocally shape the conditions of everyday life and animate human experience. Yet precisely how this bridging occurs remains underspecified. We address that gap in this and a companion article (Worthman,...
Drawing upon Stanley J. Tambiah's idea of “world conquerors” and “world renouncers,” this article examines the Burmese political festival (nainganyei pwe) as a ritual, affective, and material space where former political prisoners reinterpret violence and engage in forms of collective and personal “world‐making.” The article focuses on one practice in particular: the ritual wearing of white shirts...
This article examines the discursive construction of moral conflict in a military veteran's (post)war story. By closely examining the linguistic details of a single veteran's narrative of war, this article addresses how moral conflict is revealed in shifts among varying modes of morality: from the conventional moral dispositions of the military, in which soldiers are socialized into acting, often...
Our previous companion article situated practices in a socio‐ecological framework to propose action landscapes as person‐specific fields of possible practices that are place‐ and time‐contingent. Here we expand this approach to social actors as they navigate complex, fluid social worlds to pursue meaningful lives. Embodiment, social homeostasis, and social interactions shape actors’ abilities to enact...
How do people experience vulnerability, and what can this experience tell us about how states help those living in precarious conditions? According to the Chilean state, people who live in vulnerable encampments do so strictly out of necessity, not choice, and vulnerability is best addressed by demolishing encampments, resettling their communities, and giving the poor opportunities to recover their...
This qualitative study presents an analysis of data taken from 16 participants who were interviewed during and 1 year after they attended a course in Cognitively‐Based Compassion Training (CBCT), a meditation course that seeks to help participants cultivate empathy and compassion. The study sought to examine what benefits, if any, participants in a CBCT course reported with regard to their understanding...