Social Analysis

This article examines family care for sick older people in a rural hospital in Guangdong Province. Drawing on six months of fieldwork, I show how local families divide the duty of care for the elderly, and how care is perceived in local discourse. Specific attention is paid to competing notions of care and how their meanings are negotiated: neighbors and even family members often show themselves to be indifferent to elder care, and care work is feminized and devalued. At the same time, family members and daughters in particular have to shoulder duties of care. The contradictory emotions of gendered care work offer a vantage point to understand the changing dynamics of patriarchy, marketization, and state paternalism in China today.

The magical idiom of evil occupies an important position in numerous Christian societies. Cosmological capture refers to a historicized process through which Christian narratives and institutions attempt to integrate evil into dualist and oppositional cosmological schemas. This article begins by addressing the way that biblical stories of defeated magicians contribute to modern dynamics of cosmological capture. It then proceeds to address the role of evil in Cypriot society through narratives and descriptions of everyday rituals and events. As these narratives and rituals show, capture remains incomplete, and as evil extends beyond the limits of dualist categorization, the result is a situation of ‘magical disorder’: a cosmological arrangement in which evil manifests as an indifferent and inhuman force, which nevertheless conditions everyday experience and social relations.

One of the most disturbing phenomena during episodes of mass violence concerns individuals who hated a specific group and harmed some of its members while making exceptions for people they had a relationship with. A preexisting social tie, not moral consciousness, produces this aversion to harming a party to the relationship, even if rescuing vulnerable individuals contradicts personal beliefs, orders, or group loyalty. Hatred is stronger than bonds only when the latter are weak, fraught, or missing in the first place. I call this phenomenon relational exceptionalism. Bringing the anthropological literature on interpersonal relationships to bear on studies of mass violence, this article illustrates that to trigger relational exceptionalism, a relationship requires not reciprocity, trust, obligations, affinities, or nearness, but a degree of autonomy.

People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.

On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner, by Iracema Dulley. New York: Routledge, 2019.