19 results match your criteria: "Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.[Affiliation]"

Legal pluralism and the production of (un)certainty in lived migration orders.

Leg Plur Crit Soc Anal

July 2024

Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.

This article builds on three of Keebet von Benda-Beckmann's core concepts, namely, legal pluralism, social security and relational social theory, to reflect on the place of law in lived migration orders, both in the global north and in the global south. To do this, we build on three empirical case studies from our respective fieldsites in Germany, Belgium and the DRC. These cases illustrate how 'thinking with Keebet's work' not only offers useful 'sensitizing concepts' for the empirical study of migration law and migration studies more broadly, but also provides a much-needed conceptual vocabulary to speak to and intervene in current debates in more doctrinal legal scholarship on global migration law.

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(Mis)Perceiving Apnea and Insomnia in Germany: A Tale of Two Disorders.

Med Anthropol

January 2024

Department 'Anthropology of Politics and Governance', Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany.

In Germany, both apnea and insomnia are highly prevalent sleep disorders. But while there is an extensive and growing infrastructure to deal with apnea, there is very little support for insomnia patients. I argue that this is due to various interrelated factors: the role of evidence and experience in diagnosis, the availability of treatment, and-importantly-how evidence, experience, and treatment can (or cannot) be materialized in the medical economy.

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The debate on the ethics of dementia research has tended to treat individuals with dementia, primary caregivers other family members and local communities as preestablished and distinct categories of research participants. What has been overlooked are the meaningful social relationships that run through these categories and how these relationships affect the ethnographer's positionality during and after fieldwork. In this paper, drawing on two cases of ethnographic research on family dementia care in North Italy, we propose two heuristic devices, "meaningful others" and "gray zones", which highlight the ambiguous positionality of ethnographers in care relations and local moral worlds.

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Consent in medical practice is a process riddled with layers of complexities. To some extent, this is inevitable given that different medical conditions raise different sets of issues for doctors and patients. Informed consent and risk assessment are highly significant public health issues that have become even more prominent during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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In this article, I take the principle underwriting Gramsci's philosophy of praxis that 'all men are philosophers', as a point of departure to interrogate the anti-cosmopolitan everyday conceptions of the world I encountered during my fieldwork in an Austrian Alpine village in the midst of the Corona pandemic. In an attempt to understand the social and political force of such vernacular reasonings, I map the contours of a critical phenomenology of common sense. Following Gramsci's lead, I reiterate that philosophical ideas uttered by the 'man and woman in the street' should be taken seriously by intellectuals.

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In this introduction, we propose the notion of 'embodied belonging' as a fruitful analytical heuristic for scholars in medical and psychological anthropology. We envision this notion to help us gain a more nuanced understanding of the entanglements of the political, social, and affective dimensions of belonging and their effects on health, illness, and healing. A focus on embodied belonging, we argue, reveals how displacement, exclusion, and marginalization cause existential and health-related ruptures in people's lives and bodies, and how affected people, in the struggle for re/emplacement and re/integration, may regain health and sustain their well-being.

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This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-scale commercial farming in the Omo-Turkana Basin, based on an expert elicitation coupled with a scoping review and the collective knowledge of an multidisciplinary network of researchers with active data-collection programs in the Basin. We use social-ecological systems and political ecology frameworks to assess the impacts of these interventions on hydrology and ecosystem services in the Basin, and cascading effects on livelihoods, patterns of migration, and conflict dynamics for the people of the region. A landscape-scale transformation is occurring in which commodities, rather than staple foods for local consumption, are becoming the main output of the region.

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The convergence of climate change and post-Soviet socio-economic and institutional transformations has been underexplored so far, as have the consequences of such convergence on crop agriculture in Central Asia. This paper provides a place-based analysis of constraints and opportunities for adaptation to climate change, with a specific focus on water use, in two districts in southeast Kazakhstan. Data were collected by 2 multi-stakeholder participatory workshops, 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary statistical data.

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Camels and Climate Resilience: Adaptation in Northern Kenya.

Hum Ecol Interdiscip J

November 2016

Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation, P.O. Box 147, Marsabit, Kenya.

In the drylands of Africa, pastoralists have been facing new challenges, including those related to environmental shocks and stresses. In northern Kenya, under conditions of reduced rainfall and more frequent droughts, one response has been for pastoralists to focus increasingly on camel herding. Camels have started to be kept at higher altitudes and by people who rarely kept camels before.

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In a study of three indigenous and non-indigenous cultural groups in northwestern and northeastern Siberia, framed line tests and a landscape drawing task were used to examine the hypotheses that test-based assessments of context sensitivity and independence are correlated with the amount of contextual information contained in drawings, and with the order in which the focal and background objects are drawn. The results supported these hypotheses, and inspection of the regression relationships suggested that the intergroup variations in test performance were likely to result from differences in the attention accorded to contextual information, as revealed by the drawings. Social and environmental explanations for the group differences in context sensitivity are also discussed.

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The concepts of transition and tradition have not been the object of much original theoretical work in recent Anglophone socio-cultural anthropology. The term transition has been applied loosely to the demise of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and their replacement by market economies and more pluralist forms of government. However, these objectives have proved elusive and most anthropologists therefore speak of open-ended "transformation processes" rather than a linear shift to capitalist democracy.

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This paper recounts and reflects on conversations about love and sexuality conducted with young people in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana. It examines the settings of these conversations - in a kinship-based household, secondary schools and Pentecostal churches - and explores young people's reticence to talk about such matters in the light of intergenerational respect. Analysing young people's strategies of silence and provocative speech, the paper shows that, paradoxically, schools and churches provide institutionalised spaces for young people's subversive outspokenness that contrasts with the ethical codex of decency as the expression of hierarchical relations.

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In a Russian Orthodox Church drug rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg, drug addiction was often described as a disease of frozen feelings. This image suggests that rehabilitation is a process of thawing emotional worlds and, thus, allows the emotions to flow once again.

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In anthropology, research on human spatial orientation (wayfinding) has centered on two conflicting theories: the "mental map," whereby humans build abstract cognitive representations of the spatial relations between objects, and "practical mastery," which rejects the idea that such abstract representations exist and, in its most developed form, suggests that wayfinding is a process of moving from one recognized visual perspective (vista) to another (transitions between vistas). In this paper we reveal, on the basis of existing psychology and geography research, that both wayfinding theories are in fact complementary: humans rely on mental maps but also memorize vistas while navigating, and an individual's navigation method, ability, and the form of the mental map is likely to depend on a situation as well as on factors such as age, sex, familiarity with the environment, and life history. We demonstrate (using research material obtained during fieldwork carried out among Komi and Nenets reindeer herders) that anthropology can contribute to human spatial cognitive research, which has traditionally been an interdisciplinary endeavor, by identifying differences in spatial representation between different people and peoples.

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Within the Russian Federation there are nearly 200 recognized "nationalities," approximately 130 of which could claim to be "indigenous." However, only 45 peoples are officially recognized as "indigenous small-numbered peoples of the Russian Federation" and thereby qualify for the rights, privileges, and state support earmarked for indigenous peoples. This status is conditioned upon a maximum group size of 50,000.

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Based on a field study in a village in the northern plain of China, this paper reviews three different types in how Han-Chinese rural people have coped with domestic electrical appliances during the last 40-odd years of electrification. The aim of this paper is to offer an ethnographic study of the complex relations between technology and social life in a Chinese rural setting and to explore the logic and dynamics whereby rural populations confront and integrate new technical products into their everyday life. This paper is divided into three main parts: following the introduction on the "everyday technology approach" and background information about the field site, the author next gives a brief historical description of the electrification process in rural China.

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