Shamans, Bureaucrats, and Their Cosmologies: Local Religious Organisations in Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region

Over the course of the last 18 years, shamans in Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region have started to register “local religious organizations”. This development has transformed shamanism itself whilst also forcing the Ministry of Justice to articulate whether shamanism could be considered a religion. The article describes this process as an interactive loop: the classifiable (shamans) responds to the process of classification (state registration) and then changes that classification. The study hinges on two findings. First, the differences in the structure of shamanic organizations lead them to create fundamentally different ways of describing the world (classification systems). Secondly, some of these classifications align more closely with the language of the state. The author builds on the “grid and group” model by Mary Douglas, which is subsequently augmented with conceptual insights from Bernstein and Collins. The model makes it possible to highlight three types of organizations that respond differently to the language of state classification. The study is based on empirical data (40 interviews and participant observation) collected by the author during an expedition to Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region between December 2019 and January 2020.

Predicting the Past

Drawing from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Mary Douglas, Predicting the Past advocates a reflexive understanding of the paradoxical institutional dynamic of American literary history as a professional discipline and field of study. Contrary to most disciplinary accounts, Michael Boyden resists the utopian impulse to offer supposedly definitive solutions for the legitimation crises besetting American literature studies by “going beyond” its inherited racist, classist, and sexist underpinnings. Approaching the existence of the American literary tradition as a typically modern problem generating diverse but functionally equivalent solutions, Boyden argues how its peculiarity does not, as is often supposed, reside in its restrictive exclusivity but rather in its massive inclusivity which drives it to constantly revert to a self-negating “beyond” perspective. Predicting the Past covers a broad range of both well-known and lesser known literary histories and reference works, from Rufus Griswold’s 1847 Prose Writers of America to Sacvan Bercovitch’s monumental Cambridge History of American Literature. Throughout, Boyden focuses on particular themes and topics illustrating the selfinduced complexity of American literary history such as the early “Anglocentric” roots theories of American literature; the debate on contemporary authors in the age of naturalism; the plurilingual ethnocentrism of the pioneer Americanists of the mid-twentieth century; and the genealogical misrepresentation of founding figures such as Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.

Marketing électoral et données numériques personnelles aux Etats-Unis et en France : échanges interculturels de techniques, particularités juridiques et analyse politico-culturelle

Este articulo tiene como objetivo comprender los intercambios interculturales entre Estados-Unidos y Francia en relación con el marketing electoral numérico. Se interesa en las elecciones presidenciales estadounidenses entre 2008 y 2016 y francesas de 2012 y 2017. El artículo se basa en un análisis bibliográfico para identificar la situación estadounidense y en una encuesta cualitativa realizada durante las elecciones francesas de 2017. El articulo muestra las semejanzas técnicas entre los dos países. Sin embargo, debido a un marco jurídico distinto entre Estados-Unidos y Francia, las prácticas de marketing electoral numérico no son las mismas. Este trabajo intenta explicar estas diferencias entre los dos países apoyándose en la Teoría Cultural de la antropóloga Mary Douglas. Acaba por analizar cómo en Francia los actores económicos, políticos y el Estado negocian hasta llegar a una situación donde las diferencias interculturales con Estados-Unidos disminuyen This article aims to understand the intercultural exchanges from the United States to France in terms of digital electoral marketing in the context of the American presidential elections from 2008 to 2016 and the French elections of 2012 and 2017. Based on documentary research to identify the American situation and on a qualitative survey carried out during the French presidential election of 2017, it shows the existence of technical similarities between the two countries. However, due to a different legal framework in the United States and France, practices of digital electoral marketing diverge. Then the article tries to understand the origin of these disparities between the two countries by mobilizing the Cultural Theory of the anthropologist Mary Douglas: it analyses how the French economic and political actors and the State seek to negotiate together and attenuate intercultural gaps with the American situation. Cet article a comme objectif de comprendre les échanges interculturels entre les Etats-Unis et la France concernant le marketing électoral numérique. Il s'intéresse aux élections présidentielles étatsuniennes entre 2008 et 2016 et françaises de 2012 et 2017. Cet article se base sur une recherche documentaire pour identifier la situation américiane et sur une enquête qualitative réalisée durant les élections françaises de 2017. La recherche montre des similitudes techniques entre les deux pays. Cependant, du fait d'un cadre jurditique distinct entre les Etats-Unis et la France, les pratiques de marketing électoral numérique ne sont pas les mêmes. Ce travail cherche alors à expliquer les différences entre ces deux pays en s'appuyant sur la Théorie Culturelle de l'anthropologue Mary Douglas. Puis il analyse comment en France, les acteurs économiques, politiques et l'Etat négocient jusqu'à parvenir à une situation où les différences interculturelles avec les Etats-Unis diminuent.

Humour and TikTok memes during the 2020 pandemic lockdown: Tensions of gender and care faced by Chinese mothers working from home

This article examines a humorous meme that emerged on Chinese TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using #workfromhomewithchildcare, Chinese working mothers shared humorous clips of their experience of working from home with their children who were also at home during the pandemic lockdown. By analysing the themes, protagonists, and humour techniques of a sample of 85 videos, we ask why the mood of these clips is so strongly marked by humour, and what this tells us about contemporary Chinese society, particularly about the position of women and mothers. We show that these memetic clips consist of three distinct genres of mothers working from home: (1) ‘balancing mothers’ who balance between work and childcare, (2) ‘pedagogic mothers’ who give childcare tips, and (3) ‘commercially oriented’ mothers who offer tutorials by means of product placement and advertisement. While these memes express what Mary Douglas called ‘a joke in the social structure’ without offering either relief or critique, they do create an online joking culture that offers temporary relief as well as awareness that others are in the same position. Our analysis tempers enthusiastic claims about both the critical potential of humour and the new ‘liberating’ affordances offered by digital platforms to produce liberating female spaces.

Responses to health risk and suffering: ‘China’ in the Italian media discourses during the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic

Italy was one of the first European countries affected by the Covid-19 pandemic after the beginning of the outbreak in China in January 2020. Applying critical discourse analysis and theories of the mediation of suffering, this article explores the discursive strategies used by the Italian media to represent China and Chinese people in relation to the outbreak in the early stage of the pandemic. Employing the theoretical frameworks of Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and other thinkers on biopolitics, racism, and emergency, the results bring to light the persistent ideologies behind the media representations of an imagined Other, which reflect existing discourses toward the Chinese community in Italy. In this study, the contentious discourses around China and the Chinese amidst the pandemic reveal the role of the Italian media in presenting risks, mediating suffering as a distant event and, later, as a national concern.

How the Perception of Public Official on Organizational Culture Influences Procedural Justice in Environmental Policy Processes

How does the organizational culture of local governments influence the type and extent of procedural justice in environmental policy processes? Using the culture theory developed by Mary Douglas and others, this research seeks to bring a new conception and new measures of organizational culture to the study of policy making by local governments. To contribute to the development of the conceptualization and measurement of procedural justice in the environmental policy processes of those governments, item response theory (IRT) graded response model (GRM) is used to show variations in difficulties and frequencies of adopting distinctive public participation strategies for improving procedural justice across local governments. In this study, original survey data is collected from Illinois municipalities and a finding is suggestive of cultural variables explaining the two dimensions of procedural justice, equal and authentic public participation, while other variables can, at best, explain only the equal public participation. Furthermore, as hypothesized, egalitarianism increases both equal and authentic public participation, individualism increases equal public participation, and fatalism decreases both.

Introduction

Plastic bags ride the currents of the Pacific Ocean and collect in the Mariana Trench; stockpiles of nuclear waste are pumped deep into Earth’s outer crust; smoke and smog (a fusion of particulate matter and ozone) settle in above sprawling urban colonies, slowly killing their denizens; spent oxygen canisters join “forever chemicals” on the snows of Everest; and billions of pieces of space debris endlessly fall in Low Earth Orbit, just beyond a thin and rapidly changing breathable atmosphere. So goes the narrative of the Anthropocene, a purportedly new geological epoch demarcated by the planetary effects of human activity.The symbolic anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) understood pollution as “matter out of place,” a kind of disorder that necessarily prompts efforts to “organize” the environment. Anthropologists, geographers, and other social scientists have since pushed the conversation forward by inquiring into the materiality of pollution, the toxicity that manifests in situated encounters between bodies and environments, and the co-production of pollution/toxicity— two sides of the same coin, one overflowing boundaries and the other seeping in—through those extended networks of physicochemical, organic, and sociocultural life that constitute local and global political ecologies.This issue of Environment and Society explores current thinking about pollution and toxicity at the intersection of political ecology, symbolic anthropology, and science and technology studies. The articles address a broad range of scholarly perspectives, theoretical alliances, and methodological and epistemological approaches. They collectively contribute to historical and contemporary framings of pollution and toxicity and to new understandings of their discursive and material co-production, and they outline the stakes of such an analysis for diverse communities of human and nonhuman beings. Authors in this issue address entangled themes such as the materiality of pollution/toxicity, how it is smelled, tasted, felt, experienced, embodied, or symbolized, both in moments of crisis and in daily life. Articles also home in on how and by whom the impacts—material, sociocultural, political, ethical, etc.—of pollution/toxicity are measured or otherwise accounted for technoscientifically, socioculturally, and historically. These accountings mediate governance mechanisms through policies, infrastructures, and ordinary acts of care and containment (sweeping, cleaning, planting, repairing). Finally, authors consider how pollution/toxicity reshapes sociopolitical life.

UM EXTRAVAGANTE MANTO MÍSTICO COBRE O CORPO FENDIDO DO CANGACEIRO

O artigo utiliza uma perspectiva dos estudos de gênero para examinar a exuberante indumentária criada pelo bando de cangaceiros liderados por Lampião, especialmente durante os anos 1930. Parte do argumento de Judith Butler (1990) sobre a superficialidade da construção do gênero e de uma fotografia de Lampião e Maria Bonita tirada por Benjamin Abrahão para propor que o traje cangaceiro funcionava como forma de recompor misticamente o corpo “aberto” do guerreiro masculino, fraturado pela presença de mulheres no bando. Utiliza a teoria de Mary Douglas (1966) sobre a relação entre os limites do corpo e os limites sociais para compreender as negociações de gênero que se manifestaram sobre as superfícies dos objetos do cangaço.

„Mój świat wypełnia ogień i krew” – „Mad Max: Na drodze gniewu” i semantyczne gry z postapokaliptycznym brudem

Założenia formalne kina postapokaliptycznego wymuszają określoną estetykę, której dominantę często stanowi brud przeciwstawiany domniemanej czystości świata sprzed katastrofy. Przykładem realizacji tej strategii jest film Mad Max: Na drodze gniewu (Mad Max: Fury Road, reż. George Miller, 2015). Autor wskazuje wszakże, że dzieło Millera ujawnia ciekawą ambiwalencję: sugerując prawomocność typowej dla tego nurtu opozycji brud-czystość i jednocześnie ją unieważnia. W omawianym filmie można bowiem dostrzec trzy różne systemy znaczeniowe ufundowane na tych kategoriach. Pierwszy wynika z przyjęcia konwencji, a dwa następne są oryginalną wizją autorską i stanowią udaną próbę przezwyciężenia typowych uwikłań znaczeniowych świata postapokaliptycznego. W artykule zostały wykorzystane m.in. metody semiotycznej analizy filmu zaproponowanej przez Rolanda Barthes’a, a także ustalenia Mary Douglas dotyczące kategorii brudu i czystości w kulturze.