 Subjects -> ANTHROPOLOGY (Total: 398 journals)
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- Neoliberalism and the Opportunodemic
Authors: Steve Hall
Pages: 44 - 62
Abstract: It would be far too unkind to suggest that academics and journalists have presented the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation from its broader economic context. However, it would be less unkind to suggest that its location in a triptych of major crises – the Great Financial Crash and its subsequent neoliberal austerity programmes, climate change, and the imminent deglobalisation signaled by the Ukraine-Russia conflict –could do with a little more clarity and accuracy. I want to make a small contribution to that emerging clarity by focusing on a specific interface between the pandemic, economic thinking and the role of the nation-state.
PubDate: 2023-01-09
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9940
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2023)
- Singing Wives and Oligarch Patrons
Authors: Ingrid M. Tolstad
Pages: 63 - 83
Abstract: Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on Swedo-Russian musical collaborations, this article explores the link between popular music and the conspicuous consumption of Russia’s wealthy elite. Presenting two specific cases, one following a Russian millionaire’s wife’s efforts to become a pop star and the other exploring a wealthy Russian’s pursuit of patronage for emerging pop artists, the article describes how popular music became a means for Russia’s rich elite not only to show off their wealth and luxurious lifestyles but also to exchange monetary means for other forms of (cultural) capital, such as fame, coolness, and associations with a Western lifestyle. Furthermore, the article situates this elite dynamic in relation to specific Russian historical trajectories, and the ways in which the influence of the economic elite within the Russian music industry creates an unlevelled playing field for professionals trying to make a living from making popular music.
PubDate: 2023-03-02
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9853
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2023)
- Covid-19: Medicine and Colonialism, Past and Present
Authors: Toby Green
Abstract: This essay begins in the past, with the hope of developing a different way of thinking through the transformations of the present. Many commentators and media outlets have referred to the era of the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘unprecedented’, but there is nothing unprecedented about a pandemic. What seem unprecedented are the measures which have been taken to control the public, measures that have been implemented via a series of states of emergency: the exercise of medical power through the vehicle of the neoliberal state did lead to a pattern of state and society which was unprecedented in democratic states. On the other hand, and as I will argue in this essay, this relationship was certainly not unprecedented when it came to the history of the Western state in Africa. In fact, when we take the perspective of medical history and its relationship with colonial power, we can historicise more easily the transformations which have taken place during the Covid-19 pandemic. *** Image Credit: A medical officer taking a sample of blood from an inhabitant of Buruma Island, suffering from sleeping sickness. Photograph, 1965, after photograph 1902. In 1901, a severe sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda claimed more than 20,000 lives. The first Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission went out from the London School of Tropical medicine, the senior member was Dr Cuthbert Christy. It also included Dr Carmichael Low and Count Aldo Castellani. The album, which consists of copy photographs, was sent to Dr Poynter at the Wellcome Institute library by Professor Foster from the Department of Medical Microbiology in Uganda, in 1965. It was put together to record Foster's comments on the photographs sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), an infectious disease which affects the fluid of the spinal cord, causing lethargy and loss of physical function. In Uganda it was passed most virulently by the bite of the tsetse fly. Created 1965. Contributors: Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission. Meeting (1902). https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YW029102V/A-medical-officer-taking-a-sample-of-blood-from-an-inhabitant-of-Buruma-Island-suffering-from-sleeping-sickness
PubDate: 2022-12-12
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9637
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022)
- Zagaku
Authors: Amy Tapsfield
Abstract: The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and training at the Yoshinkan Aikido Honbu Dojo together with groups of Japanese police officers. This particular dojo has a program called the Senshusei course where Tokyo police officers take part in a nine-month full-time training period that will bring them up to first class black belt instructor level. Alongside the aikido training, the senshusei have other duties such as being responsible for cleaning the entire building, maintaining a training diary, writing weekly essays, and helping at dojo functions. This course removes them from their policing duties for the duration of the training, yet they remain on salary. The Japanese police are encouraged to train in either aikido, judo, or kendo, as well as required firearm practice, as a part of their job. The senshusei course enrols a maximum of ten officers each year, and is just one of many training options available to them for their professional development. From interviews conducted I discovered that, despite being known amongst the Tokyo police for the intensity of the training, completion of senshusei does not necessarily bestow greater importance, respect, or professional status onto those who do it, and most of the officers I trained with signed up simply due to a personal interest in martial arts. A couple of the police told me that judo and kendo have a larger following, so there is apparently less competition if you choose aikido. After completing the course, they are expected to act as instructors to the other officers in their area units (though this is largely dependent on whether anyone is interested). Alongside this, there is a course that civilians can enrol in, of slightly longer duration (eleven months), that trains together with the police and shares all the same duties, usually containing mostly non-Japanese nationals and is therefore known as the International Senshusei or Kokusai Senshusei course. This course has been running since 1990 and was set up due to popular demand from non-Japanese aikido practitioners, many of whom had already been travelling to Japan in order to train for some years. This course is what I undertook and completed in 2017-18. This piece of writing is a first-hand description of one of the aspects of that training, called zagaku: meaning ‘seated learning,’ once a week all senshusei had to spend one full 90-minute training session in seiza, the traditional kneeling position. This practice was derived from the era when Shioda Gozo-sensei (the founder of Yoshinkan Aikido) was still alive and leading the dojo in the late 1990s; it was for all the senseis to attend and reflect on their progress and techniques. This session would usually last around 45mins, during which time everyone had to pay attention to the discussion despite the pain they were in, as Shioda-sensei could call on anyone to contribute at any time. This was a method of training the mind as well as the body, to be able to maintain concentration whilst in significant pain and stress, similar to the meditative practice of zazen performed by Buddhist monks. Ueda-sensei, who had attended these sessions when a young man and was head of the dojo whilst I was there, had been greatly influenced by this practice and decided to implement it for the senshusei course. This decision appeared to be something of a whim, as he had only begun using the practice three years earlier, despite having been in charge of the course for a lot longer (the next year, when a different sensei took over management of the police training, the practice of zagaku was dropped). This experience was incredibly painful and hated by both the police and the international senshusei, yet we all submitted ourselves to its torture at the same time every week. Describing this training to Japanese friends outside of the dojo, they would look at me with horrified disbelief just thinking about how painful it would be, and that was the point; the pain and discomfort were a crucial element of zagaku. Even the senseis felt it despite their decades of practice. This auto-ethnographic piece will form the opening chapter of my PhD thesis, from which starting point I will go on to examine the key themes of pain, discipline, consent, embodied experience, auto-ethnography, methods of learning, behaviours of respect, non-violence, power, and social responsibility within the context of Japan. However, I have made the decision to leave theory out of this article, as the main purpose is for the reader to be given an uninterrupted, embodied taste of the experience as it was lived. There are many academics from various disciplines writing about the theory of pain, but it remains an elusive experience that is rarely described for its own sake. The medical profession still struggles to create methods that patients can use to accurately communicate the intensity and form of their pain, as language is decidedly lacking for such things, so I wanted to use this longer piece as an attempt to communicate what usually remains incommunicable. The anthropology of martial arts is acquiring a strong collection of ethnographies, but descriptions of the embodied experiential elements of training are often cut short to prioritise theoretical analysis. It is an area where the ethnographer often uses their own body as a source of data; training, learning, and getting injured becoming a crucial part of the research methodology. Watching from the side-lines would not have allowed me any insight into the experience of zagaku; the fact that I did ex...
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9459
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022)
- Covid-19 and the Future of Work
Authors: Anthony Lloyd
Pages: 1 - 20
Abstract: This paper offers a critical reflection on the impact of Covid-19 and government public health measures on patterns of work in the UK. This paper will focus specifically on remote or home workers as this generates myriad questions about the future of work and employment, particularly in the context of advances in digital technology and the growing emphasis on environmental inequality, the spectre of climate change and a green revolution. If the laptop class work from home, they can help control the spread of Covid-19, tackle climate change and rebalance their lives – we were told. Reflecting on the pandemic, an assumption of harmlessness underpins home working. Then I look towards the future and raise questions about the role of digital technology, algorithmic governance and surveillance in our working lives. As more of us are encouraged to utilise the latest digital technologies in our working lives, it is crucial to look critically at these developments and their implications for workers. Working practices deemed necessary to tackle the pandemic are now part of a long-term future which requires further interrogation as to whether the short-term and long-term changes associated with digital technology, algorithmic governance and surveillance also make hidden assumptions of harmlessness.
PubDate: 2022-10-31
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9653
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022)
- Revolutionaries as Political Women
Authors: Manashi Misra
Pages: 21 - 43
Abstract: The purpose of studying women’s participation in radical movements, as the classical study We Were Making History notes, is ‘an attempt to broaden the history of that struggle by recovering the subjective experience of women, to capture women’s voices from the past and to present issues as they were perceived by women’ (Stree Shakti Sanghathana, 1989, 2). Taking this framework as the point of departure, this article seeks to explore the history of women’s participation in the secessionist politics of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Deviating from the existing scholarships on the subject that rightly focus on the lack of adequate women’s representation at the leadership level, this article argues that representation at formal political negotiations is not the only form of political activity that women aspire to. Instead, in their own way, many of these revolutionaries have in fact turned into ‘political women’. Fictional writings in the Assamese language are more forthcoming than academic scholarship in recognizing this alternative, informal politics in which women engage. At the same time, it is important to note that these ‘political women’ need not be free from conventional gendered prejudices.
PubDate: 2022-12-12
DOI: 10.5617/jea.9652
Issue No: Vol. 6, No. 2 (2022)
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