The Ethnograph: Journal of Anthropological Studies

Two-Spirits, Four Medicines:

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In this essay I reflect on my experience of Truth and Reconciliation Day as a Two-Spirit person. I illustrate how Queer, Trans, and Two Spirit (or 2S) Indigenous individuals have been affected by the legacy of Canadian Residential Schools. I also engage with the history of the term Two-Spirit and the politics surrounding this identity.

Secrecy Unveiled:

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Secrecy and the maintenance of secrets have long been important sites of study for anthropology and other cognate disciplines, but few papers reflect on how the social power of secrets are supplanted when corporations are involved in taking secrets away from the individual. This paper reflects on the death of old notions of secrecy and the birth of modern notions of secrecy under a corporate capitalist system, and how previous anthropological thought on secrecy and power relations may be applicable to secrets. To do so, I examine how a data-mining company called Palantir displaces secrecy from the individual and their social sphere by constructing secrets as a piece of data to be bought and sold. Through examining previous anthropological thought and drawing on a case study of Palintir’s operating system, Gotham; I intend to show that Palintir positions itself as a ‘secret extractor’ and how his reputation grants the corporation social power. However, this social power is not taken at no cost to social well-being; the extractive and unethical practices that Palintir uses to gather secrets are not being properly addressed.

Arts organizing as urban commoning

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This article explores dynamics and outcomes of community-based arts organizing in the urban context of Vancouver, Canada. Through a case study of a community- based Vancouver arts collective, it explores the social, spatial, and material re- sources, as well as the practices, strategies and repertoires that are used by this collective to enact community-based arts initiatives. Ethnographic methodology, in- cluding interviews, focus groups, and participant observation methods, were used to explore the practices, strategies, and experiences of the collective. Various theories of commoning, including the works of Ostrom, Fournier, and Federici, are employed to dissect how the ‘commoning’ of social, cultural, spatial, and economic resources is enacted by the collective, becoming a potent strategy to enable collective artistic practice. The ethnography reveals that this habitus of commoning, as it is enacted through community-based arts practice, enables powerful forms of grassroots com- munity governance and self-determination.

Critiquing the Institutionalization of the Red Dress Exhibit in the Canadian Museum For Human Rights

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This paper examines the complexities of institutionalizing The Red Dress Project, a symbol addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2s), within museums, particularly the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Specifically highlighting strained historical relationships between Indigenous peoples and museums, this critique emphasizes the risk of portraying an ongoing issue as a historical event, hindering public awareness and action. I will expand on my critique by utilizing my personal experience at the museum, not only as a museum patron, but as a Coast Salish, Two-Spirit person myself.

Contemporary Fairy Lore and The Tooth Fairy

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The use of supernatural narratives and folk beliefs reflect societal beliefs, desires, and fears. In Canada and the United States of America, one of the largest folk beliefs is the Tooth Fairy. This paper explores three phases of fairy representations: The folkloric fairy, the Victorian-era literary fairy, and the contemporary fairy. The contemporary fairy is grounded in auto-ethnographic reflections of familial folk fairy beliefs and early 2000s fairy representations. This paper describes fairy folk traditions like the Tooth Fairy as structures to help process fears of growing up too quickly for both the child and adults. Additionally, this paper views the shift of fairies in early 2000s media and literature as part of a broader capitalist and patriarchal narrative. Supernatural narratives of fairies currently act as a structured rite of passage and a model to young girls for their desired attitudes and roles as they grow up.

Truth as Spectacle, and Spectacle as the Inversion of Life Suffering Women, Prisoners to the Dream of Romance and Reconciliation

2024-05-14T09:26:27-07:00

Blurring the boundaries between ethnography, fiction, and literature, this essay explores the crisis of representation through literary works of post-Apartheid South Africa: Antjie Krog’s (1998) ‘Country Of My Skull’, and Njabulo S. Ndebele’s (2006) ‘The Cry Of Winnie Mandela’. Each text aims to provide a platform for testimony, record experiences of oppression, suffering, and injustice, and destabilize power imbalances; tasks which are frequently relevant to ethnographies. The authorial voice and form of their delivery, however, risks instantiating other power hierarchies and the rhetorical mechanisms that continually cast the symbolic image of suffering women as victims absent of agency. This analysis strives to highlight important hazards and power dynamics inherent to the representation of suffering and violence to offer critical insights for anthropological accounts.

Queerness in Japan: The Bishōnen Revival in Boys’ Love Manga

2024-05-14T09:28:34-07:00

Following the introduction of Western-Christian ideas in the Meiji era (1868-1912) that sought to regulate expressions of gender and sexuality, and the consequent institutionalisation of these ideas in Japanese society, contemporary Japanese queer communities have since faced difficulties. From discrimination to social retaliation, the hostility towards gender identities and sexualities seen as transgressive to heteronormativity have resulted in the hesitation of queer individuals to out themselves or to create a visible community. Instead, they have turned towards other means to privately explore their sexuality and gender and engage with other queer-identifying people. This has been most notable through the manga genre known as BL (boys’ love) and its use of the historic bishōnen aesthetic (an androgynous beauty defying a classically Western male-female gender binary). This paper focuses on the revival of the bishōnen aesthetic in manga, examining how BL manga magazines have created an underground queer community, as well as how readers have utilised bishōnen characters as self-inserts to understand their sexualities and genders.

The Domovoy: Benevolent House Spirit or Overbearing Grandpa?

2024-05-14T09:30:31-07:00

Contemporary belief in the Slavic house spirit, the Domovoy (or Domovoi), among Russians stems from a long history of Slavic pagan belief. Ethnographic data reveals that the Domovoy is regarded as a benevolent ancestor and spirit to a given family. He is responsible for all domestic aspects of his dwelling. He punishes amoral behaviour like a messy home and aids his family through favours when they please him. The Domovoy’s characteristics and behaviours reflect larger social and cultural values of Russian peasants before their Christianization in the 10th century. Values of communal and cooperative behaviour, sharing, modesty, and domestic harmony are evident in the ‘rules’ the Domovoy sets for his family. This paper investigates how the belief in the Domovoy strengthens these values of community and tradition. The persistence of the Domovoy in the religious beliefs of contemporary rural Russians exemplifies how studying folk and pagan aspects of larger religious institutions can aid in understanding the cultural intricacies of rural populations.

Examining Illness Narratives of Hikikomori

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Hikikomori, often described as "social withdrawal," emerged as a sociomedical condition among Japanese youth at the end of the twentieth century (Rubinstein 2016). In this paper, I aim to examine the Japanese cultural model utilized by individuals experiencing Hikikomori to articulate their circumstances. Specifically, the study will delve into the narratives employed by Hikikomori individuals to elucidate the factors leading to their entry into the Hikikomori state and the reasons behind their subsequent reintegration into society. An essential aspect of this inquiry involves examining whether these narratives reveal any indications of social suffering. Additionally, the research explores external influences on Hikikomori individuals, focusing on the directives provided by others regarding their actions. I believe that analyzing these accounts within the conceptual framework of "illness narrative” (Hunt 2000) would allow me to investigate how individuals narrate their Hikikomori experience.

Hand in Fin: Exploring Reciprocity Between Humans and Fishes Through Music

2024-05-14T09:07:07-07:00

The relationship between fish and humans in the sonic realm is one that has yet to be explored in an anthropological context. Exploring this relationship provides us with an important new understanding: there is a reciprocal sonic relationship between humans and fish which must be considered in both biological conservation efforts and when understanding the lives of fish-adjacent peoples and communities. I provide a brief overview into the complex and diverse systems that fish use to hear and how noise influences their lives, and examine findings from biological studies that describe how fish react to human-generated noise. Then, I delve into a select few cases that describe how fish and fishing appear in human music and the meanings that these songs communicate. This research reveals that just as humans have the potential to have deep, yet poorly understood, impacts on the aquatic realm of fishes through our sound and music, changes in fish and fishing appear in our sound and music.