Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article examines the mysterious side of 'company', a fundamental aspect of human existence, exemplifying it with an ethnographic vignette about a dugout canoe in the mangroves of southern Bahia (Northeast Brazil). Inspired by Kant's proposal concerning aspects of world, the article distinguishes company both from empathy and from community, as distinct registers of human sociality. Being in company necessarily engages more than two persons inhabiting a common space; it involves an intersubjective encounter that has implications not only for what we do, but also for who we are and where we are. As they emerge into personhood from within company, persons necessarily experience the presence of third parties as a possible threat, inevitably giving rise to contradictory emotions: there is as much fear and conflict as peace within company, for it brings together entities with divergent interests and combines persons and objects in the world. The article addresses the way in which companionship engages power relations, by reference both to gender and to control over land.

What is it to be alien? This article considers the debate concerning alienation/de-alienation launched by Hegel and revisited a half-century ago by Jacques Derrida. It examines the systemic reduction of legal rights of presence that migrants in contemporary Europe regularly encounter. Such experiences lead people to undergo a 'loss of presence' in the sense that they question their relationship with the world and the people around them. As Ernesto de Martino proposed, these occurrences constitute a 'subjective alienation' brought about by 'objective alienation'. In this way, they impact one's personal ontogeny, producing what I call a 'habitus of migrancy'. As a contribution toward ethnographic theory, the article engages the role of long-term self-reflection in anthropological analysis.

Abstract Anthropological history is today a growth area. This essay reviews the new collection Anthropology's Ancestors that Aleksandar Boskovic is editing at Berghahn. The three short books he has published so far are very engaging intellectual histories of three anthropologists of the past who have recently received increased critical attention and whose legacy certainly deserves it: Robertson Smith, Margaret Mead and Françoise Héritier.

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AbstractHow do humans, who are materially composed biological constructs, come to transcend – that is, to see themselves as present in – the world? This article sustains that, in order to understand transcendence in personhood, we have to see the latter as a product of dividual not individual participation, as initially proposed by Lévy‐Bruhl and recently developed by a number of phenomenologically inspired cognitive scientists. This being the case, it becomes necessary to account for the relation between essence and existence in the case of metapersons (ghosts, deities, ancestors, some animals, etc.). In this essay, I suggest that this, too, must be explained by reference to the ontogeny of persons‐who‐wakingly‐live‐in‐the‐world. In order to explore this issue, I discuss an occurrence that took place in my presence without my noticing it at the time when I was visiting an Afro‐Brazilian temple compound in coastal Bahia (Northeast Brazil) in July 2011.

ResumoO nosso mundo contemporâneo é global no sentido de que se tornou um espaço indiviso de intercomunicação humana – uma ecumene, no sentido de uma rede de redes. Dentro deste vasto espaço, porém, é possível identificar zonas no interior das quais a intercomunicação ocorre com mais densidade. Esta noção não tem recebido a atenção analítica que merece – tal como sugeriu Sidney Mintz, quando propôs que o Caríbe fosse concebido como uma ecumene. Também Tolkien, na sua escrita ficcional, atribuiu especial peso à noção, recorrendo à expressão "a terra do meio". O presente ensaio sustem que a partilha de um passado histórico comum funciona como um catalisador para a amicitia quer dizer, a familiariedade que resulta de viver num mundo comum. Nesse sentido, o ensaio propõe que o espaço/tempo que origina da expansão histórica dos portugueses (a lusotopia) deva ser concebido como uma "terra do meio", onde a proximidade e a distância, a amizade e o conflito se mobilizam com especial intensidade.

O assunto interessa e afeta diretamente a todos os brasileiros natos, naturalizados e estrangeiros residentes no Brasil que aqui exerçam atividades remuneradas, assim como seus dependentes. Isto quer dizer, mais de 110 milhões de pessoas, que são abrangidos pela Previdência Social e pela Assistência Medica no Brasil. E assunto que vem, desde há muito, chamando a atenção do povo brasileiro, atingido e afetado pela qualidade de seu funcionamento. Infelizmente, e também assunto que tem ganhou notoriedade no noticiário dos meios de comunicação, devido a série de escândalos financeiros e outras irregularidades que, inexoravelmente, já deixaram marcas e cicatrizes e abalaram a confiança do público nessas instituições, que, por sua natureza, devem e precisam ficar sempre isentas de qualquer suspeita de ineficiência ou corrupção métodos os seus níveis.

This article is a study of personal naming using drawings made by secondary school students from two small towns in coastal Bahia (Brazil) of the persons who gave them their names. The article explores the relation between namer and named as one of continued identity created by imaginative processes of surrogation akin to pretend‐play. In early ontogeny, the person is constituted through a series of mutualities of being that come to constitute a core of affects. The article aims to contribute towards a better understanding of the processes of constitution of personhood in the context of human relatedness.