Julián's Choice: Of Jaguar-Shamans and the Sacrifices Made for Progreso in Peru's Extractive Frontier

In May 2010, Julián Miranda, an Indigenous Asháninka shaman, died hours after killing a jaguar-shaman. Despite knowing that it could kill him, he killed a jaguar-shaman to protect his cows, an investment to support the much-desired progreso (‘progress’) of his children and grandchildren through education. Julián's choice was one of personal sacrifice driven by the hardships he experienced in the degraded forests of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the Peruvian Amazon. My examination of his decision to kill the jaguar-shaman engages with the multi-disciplinary literature on how local peoples engage with the expanding extractive frontier in Latin America. The emphasis most literature places on social movements and – to a lesser extent – on the ontological characteristics of these conflicts needs to be counterbalanced by individual experiences like Julián's for a deeper understanding of the multiple local experiences of large-scale resource extraction and the different strategies through which people pursue their desired futures.

ANTROPOLOGIE SOCIÁLNÍCH VZTAHŮ V SOUDOBÉM VIETNAMU

This review article presents a publication on ethnographic, linguistic, and social relations in the families that remained in Vietnam after the wars. Some family members still face post-war pressures and war trauma. Others face the social imperatives of caring for their elderly or sick relatives. Limitations in personal life are the main concept of the book reviewed which focuses on the role of the personal sacrifice. This is complemented by the social relations of love and care, the cult of ancestors and the demand for filial devotion. In Vietnamese families, these rules are fixed and are reflected in the linguistic means of communication (e.g., mother—child), which the author analyses from the linguistic point of view and documents it with the use of photographs of communication situations. The review points to alternative interpretations and cultural specifics of living traditions of magical thinking and polygamy.

Moral Development of Preschooler’s Rewarding and Punishment Behavior to Environmental Actions

There is a growing concern for environmental issues and urgent need to understand interaction between human behavior and nature. Rewarding environmental protection and punishing harm can be the behavioral consequence of the moral judgment to environmental actions. Two studies (N = 211) were designed to understand the early development of such moral behaviors. In Study 1 and the follow-up conceptual replication Study 2, we performed 4- to 6-year-old children with both environmental protection and harm. Three tasks measured children’s behavioral responses toward environmental actions: reward the action that they think is good or punish the action that they think is bad even at a cost. Results demonstrated that children differentiate environmental actions and depicted an age-increase preference to environmental protection. Preschoolers, as a third-party bystander, actively punish environmental harm; with age, they become more consistently and steadily willing to be punitive even with a personal sacrifice. Together, young children are pro-environmental; from early in development children show a behavioral capacity to promote environmental good. The research fills the gap between moral judgment and behavior and contributes to applied implications.

Genocide Perspectives VI: The Process and the Personal Cost of Genocide

Genocide Perspectives VI grapples with two core themes: the personal toll of genocide, and processes that facilitate the crime. From political choices governments and leaders make, through to denialism and impunity, the crime of genocide recurs again and again, across the globe. At what cost to individuals and communities? What might the legacy of this criminality be? This collection of essays examines the personal sacrifice genocide takes from those who live through the trauma, and the generations that follow. Contributors speak to the way visual art and literature attempt to represent genocide, hoping to make sense of problematic histories while also offering a means of reflection after years of “slow violence” or silenced memories. Some authors generously allow us into their own histories, or contemplate how they may have experienced genocide had they been born in another time or place. What facets contribute to the processes that lead to, or enable the crime of genocide? This collection explores those processes through a variety of case studies and lenses. How do nurses, whose role is inherently linked to care and compassion, become mass killers? How do restrictions on religious freedom play a role in advancing genocidal policies, and why do perpetrators of genocide often target religious leaders? Why is it so important for Australia and other nations with histories of colonial genocide to acknowledge their past? Among the essays published in this volume, we have the privilege and the sorrow of publishing the very last essay Professor Colin Tatz wrote before his passing in 2019. His contribution reveals, yet again, the enormous influence of both his research and his original ideas on genocide. He reflects on continuing legacies for Indigenous Australian communities, with whom he worked for many decades, and adds nuance to contemporary understanding of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, two other cases to which he was deeply committed.

Military metaphors and pandemic propaganda: unmasking the betrayal of ‘Healthcare Heroes’

Dr Caitríona L Cox’s recent article expounds the far-reaching implications of the ‘Healthcare Hero’ metaphor. She presents a detailed overview of heroism in the context of clinical care, revealing that healthcare workers, when portrayed as heroes, face challenges in reconciling unreasonable expectations of personal sacrifice without reciprocity or ample structural support from institutions and the general public. We use narrative medicine, a field primarily concerned with honouring the intersubjective narratives shared between patients and providers, in our attempt to deepen the discussion about the ways Healthcare Heroes engenders military metaphor, antiscience discourse, and xenophobia in the USA. We argue that the militarised metaphor of Healthcare Heroes not only robs doctors and nurses of the ability to voice concerns for themselves and their patients, but effectively sacrifices them in a utilitarian bargain whereby human life is considered the expendable sacrifice necessary to ‘open the U.S. economy’. Militaristic metaphors in medicine can be dangerous to both doctors and patients, thus, teaching and advocating for the critical skills to analyse and alter this language prevents undue harm to providers and patients, as well as our national and global communities.

Type and amount of help as predictors for impression of helpers

Impression of helpers can vary as a function of the magnitude of helping (amount of help) and of situational and motivational aspects (type of help). Over three studies conducted in Sweden and the US, we manipulated both the amount and the type of help in ten diverse vignettes and measured participants’ impressions of the described helpers. Impressions were almost unaffected when increasing the amount of help by 500%, but clearly affected by several type of help-manipulations. Particularly, helpers were less positively evaluated if they had mixed motives for helping, did not experience intense emotions or empathy, or if helping involved no personal sacrifice. In line with the person-centered theory of moral judgment, people seem to form impressions of helpers primarily based on the presumed underlying processes and motives of prosociality rather than its consequences.

War, Heroes and Sacrifice: Masking Neoliberal Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The precarity and violation that has resulted from decades of neoliberal reforms have been made clear in the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in terms of access to healthcare and financial inequality. However, ideological discourses of individual heroics have been rapidly deployed, to patch up the damage done to neoliberal rhetoric. In this paper, we argue a critical sociological lens reveals something important about this violence of neoliberalism at this moment during the crisis. Analysing media articles that have considerable reach, availability and shareability, we interrogate the rhetorical framing of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and uncover three significant themes: ‘celebrating “our” heroes’, ‘personal sacrifice’ and ‘the heroes of war’. We argue that the emerging field of the sociology of violence provides the means to expose the violence of neoliberalism in the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as identify the discursive apparatus that obscure the violation of neoliberalism more generally.