Stories about Past, Present and Future: Memory and Narrative between Refugee Pasts and Migrant Futures among Young People in Chiapas, Mexico

This article explores processes of memory among diasporic children and grandchildren of Guatemalan refugees, by reflecting on a postmemorial theatre project in Southern Mexico. The theatrical performances enable me to analyse how young research participants perform their ‘postmemorial repertoire’ and how their performances are being evaluated by older residents. The encounters and clashes between eye-witness accounts and postmemorial mediation and imagination are both conflictive as well as productive. In a second step, the postmemorial processes are put in conversation with the ways young people participate actively in the creation of other types of memory, which are anticipatory and contain narratives around migration.

Turbulent Climate Discourses in Northern Sweden

I examine how tensions between locals, environmentalists, and State politicians in a small town in northern Sweden are reinforced through national discourses of climate change and sustainability. Turbulence emerges across different scales of responsibility and environmental engagement in Arjeplog as politicians are seen by local inhabitants to be engaging more with the global conversation than with the local experience of living in the north. Moreover, many people view the environmentalist discourses from the politicians in the south, whom they deem to be out of touch with rural life, as threatening to the local experience of nature. These discourses pose a threat to their reliance on petrol, essential for travel, and are experienced locally as a continuation of the south’s historical interference in the region. Based on thirteen months of field research, I argue that mistrust of the various messengers of climate change, including politicians and environmentalists, is a crucial part of the scepticism towards the climate change discourse and that we as researchers need to utilise the strengths of anthropology in examining the reception (or refusal) of climate change. The locals’ mistrust of environment discourses had implications for my positionality, as I was associated with these perceived ‘outsider’ sensibilities. While the anthropology of climate change often focusses on physical impacts and resilience, I argue that we need to pay due attention to the local turbulence surrounding the discourses of climate change, which exist alongside the physical phenomena.

‘This is My Life after all’: The Social Reconstruction of the Personhood in a Taiwanese Experimental School

This article examines a Taiwanese ‘free’ school, which I name as Wholesome School, based on an ethnography of forty-six days participating and observing teachers’ and students’ lives on campus. Taiwan, a democratic country under the influence of the progressive education movement, provided fertile soil for education innovation. A group of educators detested the state’s factory schooling model, which upholds a single ideal of academic success and the Confucius value of filial piety and obedience, and founded Wholesome. These teachers reinvented the social game rules of schooling and endowed students with liberty, equality, and independence. In the boarding school, students lived idiosyncratically and negotiated with the others on their freedom and responsibility. Responsible for their own choices, Wholesome students learned to discover their selves, make autonomous decisions, and respect individuality as well as diversity. From this research, it is evident that while social structures have a significant power in structuring habitus and limiting choices, social actors are aware of the rules of the structures they are embedded in and the serious stakes involved in playing the games and are capable of creatively accepting, rejecting, and modifying such rules by means of their agency and reflexivity.

On the Beginnings of Anthropology Matters Journal

Anthropology Matters Journal and its mailing list are twenty years old. Established in 1999 out of the student-led seminar Ethnography at the Third Millennium held at SOAS, by 2002 the journal was available open access online. For our final issue as co-editors, we spoke with some of those involved in Anthropology Matters’ foundation about its beginnings, open access, and the changing expectations of when and where it is thought best for early career scholars to publish.