Males and Tertiary Education in Jamaica by Herbert Gayle & Peisha Bryan

It is vexing. This review may be dismissed as an “angry feminist rant” about the recently published ode to hegemonic masculinity, Males and Tertiary Education in Jamaica. The book continues a rather curious peregrination into the so-called “crisis” of Jamaican masculinity. The authors, Herbert Gayle (a social anthropologist) and Peisha Bryan (a social sector specialist) examine the “plight of males” as it relates to their level of “investment” in education. Building on existing scholarly research on the low participation of men in tertiary education specifically, they dub this problematic in the book’s preface a “clash between Jamaican males and education” (p. xiv). But, are we dealing with a clash between Jamaican males and education, or the conflict-tending relationship between males and their sacredly held cow—the institution of patriarchy? Did the authors miss an opportunity to see the problem for what it truly is: patriarchy chipping away at its construction of masculinity as always and already manifested through independence and the shouldering of the economic burdens of women and families?

In Love With the Virus: Reducing Harms, Promoting Dignity, and Preventing Hepatitis C Through Graphic Narratives

This article describes a process of creating an ethnographic comic about injection drug use and hepatitis C, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Norway. The project and the graphic publication titled The Virus were a collaboration between a social anthropologist, a graphic artist, and individuals who inject illegal drugs and are aimed at reducing bodily, social, and narrative harms related to drug use. The article argues that structurally informed interventions, such as this project, which account for the social, economic, and epistemological inequalities, benefit from taking phenomenological perspectives seriously. In our case, that attitude meant including participants’ positive associations with their current or former heroin and injecting drug usage, their stigmatized desires, and their emotions—such as love—related to the disease. The article describes the narrative, conceptual, aesthetic, and practical choices encountered in making The Virus to confront the dominant, authorized narratives in the field of drug use and hepatitis C. We sought to make choices that ultimately would not contribute to the (re)production of the very object of the prevention—stigma related to hepatitis C—but instead would create a new narrative(s) that forged a sense of purpose, recognition, and humanity.

Wendy Rose (Miwok/Hopi)

Wendy Rose, born Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards (b. 1948) in Oakland, California, is the author of several books of poetry and essays. Rose’s early poetry expresses the pain and trauma of her childhood, the loneliness and alienation she felt as a child, her lived experience as an urban, mixed-race Indian, and the disconnect she felt between being a social anthropologist and a poet. She lived in a predominantly white neighborhood near San Francisco with peers who teased her about her Native American background. She was also estranged from her Native heritage by a mixed-race mother, Betty Edwards, who refused to acknowledge her own Miwok background. Moreover, in spite of her father’s being full-blooded Hopi, tribal enrollment follows the mother’s bloodline, so she was unable to enroll. Her stepfather, Dick Edwards, was abusive, which added to her disaffection. Her poems express the rejection she felt from one side of her family and the separation that kept her from being fully embraced by the other half. Her search for identity and acceptance are themes in much of her early poetry. She eventually dropped out of high school and began to write, draw, and sing. She joined the American Indian Movement (AIM) and participated in the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology (1976) and a master’s degree (1978) from the University of California, Berkeley. She taught Native American and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; California State University, Fresno; and Fresno City College, where she retired due to health issues. She edited the American Indian Quarterly for one year. Rose belongs to the first generation of contemporary Native American writers who emerged during the 1970s. While in college, she published her first poetry collection, Hopi Roadrunner Dancing (Rose 1973 [cited under Poetry]), written under the name Chiron Khanshendel. She followed this up with several more publications in the decades that followed, along with the anthropological study, Aboriginal Tattooing in California (Rose 1979b [cited under Research]). As an anthropologist and poet, she spoke out against what she called white shamanism as well as stereotypes and the appropriation and exploitation of American Indian cultures for consumer and tourist profit. Rose’s poetry appears in over sixty contemporary literature collections and has been translated into French, German, and Danish.

Participatory Design as the Temporal Flow of Coalescing Participatory Lines

This paper argues that the existing literature on participatory design (PD) tends to focus on frontstage design interactions (workshops, participants, methodologies, techniques, etc.) to facilitate PD ‘here and now’—referred to as the interactional approach. In contrast, the paper proposes to contribute to an evolving literature, referred to as the transformational approach, that takes a more longitudinal line and which attends to both the frontstage and backstage within an extended temporal frame. To do this the paper draws on the work of the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, in particular, his concept of the happening of ongoing life as a bundle of flowing lines. The paper argues that PD becomes possible when ongoing participation is conceived of as a set of corresponding (or coalescing) and conditioning lines of flow—each line with its own history, attentionality, rhythms, tempos and so forth. To illustrate what this reorientation might mean for PD the paper draws on an in-depth action research study of a PD initiative that sought to develop a digital service to address loneliness and social isolation in a rural location in the UK. The paper explores how project members, individual participants, non-governmental organisation, government representatives, evaluators and funders co-responded to each other (or not) as they engaged, or became implicated, in the PD process. The paper concludes with some practical implications of what such an Ingoldian reorientation might mean for the ongoing development of PD as a transformational methodology.

Meaningless labor in the concept of David Graeber

David Graeber (1961–2020) is a former professor at the London School of Economics, sociologist, and social anthropologist, prominent thinker of modernity; in the decades ahead, his views and social ideas will be highly demanded in social and humanistic knowledge. Assessment is given to his social theory of labor, which Graeber dedicated multiple books and articles, viewing labor as a futile phenomenon for the society and individual. He notes that meaningless labor in just a set of actions subordinated to some social force. The analysis of his ideas reveals several important vectors of modern social mentality: 1) in reconsideration of the role of labor in life of a person and society, the social frame of references (from the perspective of total sociality) is brought to the forefront, while the economic and political vectors of the assessment of labor assessment are shifted to the background; 2) meaningless labor becomes the social norm and generates the new system of values, for example, bureaucracy, administration, office, etc.; 3) gradually and with strong consolidation in society, labor becomes part of the active symbolic struggle (for example, for power) and symbolic exchange, which entails inequality between people and social commonalities. The article substantiates the heuristic nature of application of the concept of meaningless labor in characterizing the central ideas pf David Graeber, taking into account the fact that labor is viewed as an “imitation” of social value. This thesis is fundamental in comprehension of Graeber’s theory, as all his works contain a refrain on the need to reconsider the key social values (labor, money, finance, taxes, resources, and other), the nature of which is determined by both economic and sociocultural relations.

Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport

The aim of this paper is to explore a different, more relational worldview of skill, learning and education in sport. To do this, we turn to the work of social anthropologist, Tim Ingold, leaning on the notion of enskilment, which proposes that learning is inseparable from doing and place. From this worldview, what is learned is not an established body of knowledge, transmitted into the mind of a passive recipient from an authorised being, but is a progressively deepening embodied-embedded attentiveness, where an individual learns to self-regulate by becoming more responsive to people and environmental features by ‘looking, listening and feeling’. As we discuss, Ingold’s perspectives on enskilment are rooted in the etymological connotations of education—ex-ducere, which roughly means ‘to lead out’. In applying this notion to sport, we unpack three of its entangled components, taskscapes, guided attention, and wayfinding, detailing the implications of each for the growth of enskilled sports performers. To promote the translation of these ideas, in addition to encouraging their inquiry beyond the scope of what is discussed here, sporting examples are threaded throughout the paper.

Migrant Cine-Eye: Storytelling in Documentary and Participatory Filmmaking

The so-called European ‘refugee crisis’ has bred a profusion of audiovisual accounts throughout the region, many of which aimed to give voice to hitherto voiceless, uprooted people. But as many of these ‘untold stories’ gain material expression as storylines, we are urged to consider the implications of yet another form of displacement: from the historical person to the film character, from personal stories to media representations. The growing interest into the migrant issue and visual representations of refugees have played an important role in the public construction of the ‘crisis’ but have also, paradoxically, obscured or silenced migrant voices. The authors of this paper, a documentary filmmaker (Trencsényi) and a social anthropologist (Naumescu) seek to explore narrative strategies and ethics of representation in European documentaries made after 2010 as well as their participatory filmmaking project developed in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis in Hungary. Having collaborated on several documentary films and filmmaking workshops, they approach this issue from the perspective of practitioners, offering a critical reflection as well as possible strategies for those aiming to produce audiovisual works in this field. The inclusion of refugees’ insight and their ways of constructing their own stories as well as their own observations on the receiving societies can open new possibilities for collaboration and creative engagement for social scientists and filmmakers preparing visual fieldnotes, ethnographic and documentary films as well as participatory projects.

Socio-Economic Global Cultural Flow with Reference to Select Indian English Novels

The world is unified by the word ‘globalization’ as a result of the growing interdependence of the world’s societies, economies, technologies, cultures, investment and information. Today, everything is accessible at one’s finger tips, because the world is interconnected. There is networking in all walks of life. Communication has become easier than ever and technology has begun to replace human resources. On one hand, globalization claims to have simplified living by interconnecting different parts of the world, but on the other hand, life seems to have become more complicated in the name of sociocultural networking and technological revolutions. The circulation of ideas, culture, language, and material goods as a result of networking, the reason for globalization, has been identified as global cultural flows, according to the social anthropologist and globalization theorist, Arjun Appadurai. The paper aims to look into the socio-cultural, political and economic impacts of globalizationon developing countries like India, with the help of three contemporary novels of the twenty first century Indian English literature – The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, and Q&A by Vikas Swarup. It explores the aspects of globalization in the select novels, in an attempt to understand the modern world under the influence of globalization, liberalization and capitalization.

‘It Was All a Big Theatre’: Velvet revolutions, ethnic conflicts, and conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe

In 1989 mass democratic – and later nationalist – movements rose up against governments in Eastern Europe and all communist regimes fell like overripe pears. The very speed and ease of this collapse gave rise to speculations and conspiracy theories in the general public, as well as among those who had taken part in the movements themselves. Why did this all happen at once – so suddenly, why did it all go so smoothly, and who organized it all…?! The “staging” of the democratic revolutions (Central Europe) and their subsequent national ethnic conflicts (Yugoslavia, post-Soviet Caucasus), was blamed on diverse causes: the dark political forces of USA, Russia, EU, Germany, international capital, power-hungry politicians, the secret police, and so forth… In this article I wish to record my own experience, as a student activist during the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution, and as a social anthropologist and war journalist working for several years during the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia and in the Post-Soviet Caucasus. I address the main reasons that prevented understanding the post-communist mass movements and open a space to popular myths and conspiracy theories: 1. tendencies to political theatre, 2. spontaneity and self-organization of mass movements, 3. “mass intoxication” and the internal transformation of the ecstatic actor – activist. Exploring question marks and speculations about these key moments of these mass movements contributes to their understanding.

Tożsamość natury ludzkiej i dominująca w kulturze europejskiej strategia tożsamościowa

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there is a strong correlation between the concept of human nature and culturally dominant strategies for constructing the “Other” in European culture. This relationship results in specific challenges for the social anthropologist, particularly in connection with efforts to overcome common knowledge by unveiling and disclosing the real structure of social processes. The sphere of biopolitics has shown that citizens can be stimulated by fear to act. Yet fear has a moral dimension, and thus an engaged anthropology is now needed in order to combat social injustice more actively.