Beyond Hegemony: An Anthropological Approach to the Study of the covid-19 Pandemic

Starting from a Gramscian perspective, this article offers anthropological understandings of time in the experience of pandemics in Italy. The Gramscian suggestion is to go beyond hegemony in order to study the bodily life of powers. The author explores the anthropological sense of pandemics, also touching on philosophical approaches among contemporary studies. Following this, some questions about Italy are raised. What was the Italian experience of quarantine? Is it true that there was a ‘failure’ of the health model, above all in the northern regions, which had been praised as a pioneering model of public–private sector collaboration? Is it true to read the covid-19 pandemic as evidence of ‘victory’ for Italy’s central regions, such as the model of Umbria, with its centres of anthropological resistance? The instruments for answering these questions can be found in the critical anthropology of public health as outlined in the article.

Configurations of hope at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music

In settings of conflict and hardship, education can be a portal through which future lives are imagined. Experiences of schooling are thus tied closely to the generation of hope and the transformation of young lives. The goal of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), a vocational music school in Kabul, is to transform lives through music and education, by restoring music practices, cultural rights, and the country’s relationships with the rest of the world. Hope is central to this multi-faceted project and is cultivated within the school, strategically, as a source of protection and a driver of desired change. Conceptual in scope, this article explores how hope was situated and configured within the learning experience at ANIM and entwined with the school’s transformation goals during the years 2015–2017. Using concepts of hope from critical anthropology and sociology and thematic analysis of interviews with ANIM students and teachers, it presents four configurations of hope at ANIM. It examines how these configurations were produced, nurtured, and distributed through activities, organisational culture, and environmental factors, in varying degrees of intensity and dynamism. In so doing, this article shows hope to be a complex and ambivalent resource for social impact in contexts in which music education, social transformation goals, and international aid converge. Hope produces agencies that can drive transformation, but it is always shaped and conditioned by the complex challenges and power asymmetries of the wider context.

(Re)Thinking Design with New Materialism: Towards a Critical Anthropology of Design

The article proposes an empirical and discursive understanding of design as engaging and intensifying uneven power relations. By affiliating with the ontological turn in anthropology, such re-defined reading of design acknowledges design's complicity with extractive capitalism while aiming to open up possibilities to think design otherwise. In recent years, inspired by the resurgence of materialism, abstract notions of design as mediating practice between human and environment have gained popularity. Yet, these more-than-human-centred design theories tend to obscure the material and immaterial infrastructures that still shape human and nonhuman realities. By utilising the example of sand's transformation into land and tracing its journey across sites, actors and continents, the infrastructures of planetary transformation – as well as what eludes them – are investigated. Turning matter into medium emphasises thresholds and ruptures in the human-material relationship and thus transcends both a socially constructed and material reading of reality. Through a historical and empirical relocation of the current more-than-human-centred design discourse, the research presented in this article aims to support the establishment of a critical anthropology of design.

Efekt ślepej plamki. Antropologia krytyczna wobec neoliberalizmu

In this article, the authors argue that critical anthropology must inevitably recognize its intrinsic aporia, which can be illustrated by the “blind spot” metaphor. They use the metaphor to point to a cognitive bias that can be described as the tendency to claim one’s own epistemological objectivity and axiological neutrality while ignoring the fact of being entangled in the object of anthropological critique. To illustrate the blind-spot effect they refer to the visible neoliberalization of Polish academia in the last decade. Their aim is to show how critical anthropologists (re)produce the entrepreneurial regimes, power relations, and mechanisms of subjugation that they critique. For the sake of their argument they use theories drawn from studies on governmentality, namely affect theory and the idea of the dispositive.

At the Crossroads of Modernity: Critical Anthropology in Contemporary Europe

This article addresses anthropological involvement in a political sphere constituted by the politicization of “difference” in European modernity projects, and in this context, especially conflicts related to gender, sexuality, race, nationality/ethnicity, or religious beliefs, which result in visions of antagonized, political Others. The author refers to the autoethnographic perspective and discusses her own disciplinary practices from the mid-nineties to today, pointing to the positive and negative sides of those practices. She first discusses the idea of critical anthropology as an element of academic activist debates within gender and queer studies. Then she looks at a more academic position, which makes critical anthropology into an instrument for creating images of a better future. Ultimately, she advocates a vision of critical anthropology that focuses on affective agency, thanks to which conflicting factions may perceive shared experiences and feelings. She does not assume that this kind of critical engagement is capable of bringing about broader social or political change, but believes it could make a contribution to acceptance of the Other on the micro-scale.

THE LEFTIST POLITICAL PARTIES IN LIGHT OF SIMONE WEIL’S CRITICISM: THE WORKERS’ PARTY CASE

Given the socio-political context of Latin American countries and their leftist and center-leftist parties that had governed some countries since the beginning of the 2000’s, this essay will present Simone Weil’s anthropology of a rooted people towards social justice guided by a spirituality of supernatural justice. This anthropology supports her criticism of political parties that this essay will use to examine the Brazilian context and its Workers’ Party that gov­erned the country for over thirteen years and ended its tenure after a process of impeachment. Although Simone Weil seems to be pessimistic as to whether multiparty or monoparty political systems are able to promote and maintain a social order able to lead people to find their rootedness, she develops a critical anthropology that allows us to understand when a political party abandons its commitment to develop social policies for the poor and working class. Conse­quently, the political party assumes an agenda of maintaining power, no matter the means that must be used to achieve this goal.