Gun owners, ethics, and the problem of evil: A response to the Las Vegas shooting

This article examines the ways in which American gun owners deploy a particular ethical system in their responses to instances of mass gun violence. I argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to provide a better understanding of how this ethical system is produced, thereby allowing us to move beyond the falsely dichotomous terms of the gun control debate. Recently returned from a period of fieldwork with a gun rights activist community in San Diego, California, I use ethnographic data to show that owning a firearm brings with it an ethical system that makes the prospect of giving up guns in the aftermath of a mass shooting even less attractive to my informants. Furthermore, this article focuses on what has been called “the problem of evil” by demonstrating how my informants order the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” This opposition becomes personified into a more general notion of good versus evil, thereby placing particular people in the category of the human and others in the category of the inhuman, or monstrous

''I'm indian too !'' : claiming native american identity, crafting, authority in mascots debates

Comment, dans les débats actuels sur les mascottes indiennes, l'identité indienne peut être revendiquée aussi par les américains non-indiens, pour justifier la récupération de la symbolique culturelle indienne par le monde du sport. Ce détournement, sans être nouveau, prend ici une dimension politique visant à obscurcir le propre discours des indiens

“Playing Indian,” Power, and Racial Identity in American Sport: Gerald R. Gems' “The Construction, Negotiation, and Transformation of Racial Identity in American Football”

Gerald R. Gems deserves praise for his comparative history of race, sport, and identity. Too often scholars neglect the significance of sport for marginalized groups. Gems avoids this, in part, by drawing together histories and cultures frequently segregated to examine the implications of playing football for Native Americans and African Americans. Sport, as he demonstrates, has had profound effects on individual identities, social movements, and cultural values. As useful as Gems’ account is, however, it offers neither an adequate nor a complete interpretation of the significance of playing football for marginalized groups. In contrast with Gems, who nicely recounts the heroic players and great games of old in an effort to unravel the importance of sport for racial identity, we argue in what follows that one cannot understand the significance of Native Americans and African Americans playing football without an understanding of the significance of “playing Indian” in association with it