This open access book applies insights from the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. The contributors ground the ...idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge how the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms of hospitality emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers, helping to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception.
The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the ...region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.
The reproductive care of pregnant migrants entering the European Union via its Mediterranean borders represents an under-examined topic, despite a growing scholarly emphasis on female migrants and ...the gendered aspects of migration in the past three decades. This article uses ethnographic data gathered in Greece, Italy, and Spain to examine pregnant migrants’ experiences of crossing, first reception, and reproductive care. We discuss our findings through the conceptual lens of vulnerability, which we understand as a shifting and relational condition attributed to, or dynamically endorsed by, migrant patients within given social contexts and encounters. We focus on two principal aspects of migrant women’s experiences. First, we shed light on their profiles, their journeys to Europe via the three main Mediterranean routes, and the conditions of first reception. Through ethnographic vignettes we examine the diverse ways in which pregnant migrants become vulnerable within these contexts. Second, we turn to the reproductive healthcare they receive in EU borderlands. We explore how declinations of ideas of vulnerability shape the medical encounter between healthcare professionals and migrant women and how vulnerability is dynamically used or contested by migrant patients to engage in meaningful social relations in unpredictable and unstable borderlands.
Animism in rainforest and tundra Brightman, Marc; Grotti, Vanessa Elisa; Ulturgasheva, Olga
2012, 2014., 20120815, 2012-08-15, 20120101
eBook, Book
Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged 'western' understandings of man's place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities ...credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also 'things' such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.
Narratives of the Invisible Grotti, Vanessa Elisa; Brightman, Marc
Social analysis,
03/2016, Volume:
60, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Shamanic knowledge is based on an ambiguous commensality with invisible others. As a result, shamans oscillate constantly between spheres of intimacy, both visible and invisible. A place of power and ...transformation, the spirit world is rarely described by native interlocutors in an objective, detached way; rather, they depict it in terms of events and experiences. Instead of examining the formal qualities of accounts of the spirit world through analyses of ritual performance and shamanic quests, we focus on life histories as autobiographical accounts in order to explore what they reveal about the relationship between personal history (and indigenous historicity) and the spirit world. We introduce the term ‘double reflexivity’ to refer to processes by which narratives about the self are produced through relationships with alterity.
The periodic emergence of indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Amazonia have given rise to sensational media reports and heated academic debate. In this chapter we describe briefly the ...historical and contemporary relations between indigenous peoples in and out of isolation in the Guiana Shield region of North-eastern South America and discuss the role of indigenous missionaries in histories of contact. After considering these facts in relation to some of the general debates about isolated peoples and policy, we assess the ethical dimensions of the question of emergence from isolation.
The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the ...region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.
Dans cet article, nous examinerons, sous l’angle de l’hospitalité, le traitement post mortem des migrants non identifiés qui périssent en tentant de traverser la Méditerranée, depuis l’Albanie et ...l’Afrique du Nord jusqu’en Italie. Le nombre croissant de décès de migrants dans le monde, en particulier en Méditerranée, a suscité un grand nombre d’études, qui reposent généralement sur une herméneutique de justice transitionnelle laïque et de transnationalisme fraternel. À l’appui d’une recherche de terrain menée sur le long terme dans plusieurs régions du Sud de l’Italie, nous suivrons une approche alternative, en proposant une interprétation tant des opérations de récupération spontanées et planifiées des dépouilles, que des pratiques mortuaires, y compris des procédures d’identification médico-légales et des inhumations individuelles et collectives. L’accueil des étrangers morts se manifeste à différentes échelles : il prend la forme d’une commémoration à forte connotation politique au niveau de l’État et de la communauté locale, où, grâce à de initiatives ponctuelles, des cimetières leur sont dédiés ; cependant, alors que les pratiques de commémoration des étrangers morts soulignent le statut de ceux-ci en tant que catégorie collective, les technologies médico-légales d’identification sont orientées vers la reconstruction du caractère (in)divisible de la personne. Ces processus rituels et technologiques de mémorialisation et de rattachement réveillent ensemble les fantômes du passé fasciste et colonial de l’Italie.
In this article we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand, and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organised recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of migrant dead, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales : it takes the politically charged form of memorialisation at the levels of the state and the local community ; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasise the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed towards the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialisation and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism.
Dans cet article, nous examinerons, sous l’angle de l’hospitalité, le traitement post mortem des migrants non identifiés qui périssent en tentant de traverser la Méditerranée, depuis l’Albanie et ...l’Afrique du Nord jusqu’en Italie. Le nombre croissant de décès de migrants dans le monde, en particulier en Méditerranée, a suscité un grand nombre d’études, qui reposent généralement sur une herméneutique de justice transitionnelle laïque et de transnationalisme fraternel. À l’appui d’une recherche de terrain menée sur le long terme dans plusieurs régions du Sud de l’Italie, nous suivrons une approche alternative, en proposant une interprétation tant des opérations de récupération spontanées et planifiées des dépouilles, que des pratiques mortuaires, y compris des procédures d’identification médico-légales et des inhumations individuelles et collectives. L’accueil des étrangers morts se manifeste à différentes échelles : il prend la forme d’une commémoration à forte connotation politique au niveau de l’État et de la communauté locale, où grâce à de initiatives ponctuelles des cimetières leur sont dédiés ; cependant, alors que les pratiques de commémoration des étrangers morts soulignent le statut de ceux-ci en tant que catégorie collective, les technologies médico-légales d’identification sont orientées vers la reconstruction du caractère (in)divisible de la personne. Ces processus rituels et technologiques de mémorialisation et de rattachement réveillent ensemble les fantômes du passé fasciste et colonial de l’Italie.
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