Bruk av straff i ulike kulturer: Et antropologisk perspektiv

Artikkelen er et gjenopptrykk av en artikkel med samme tittel som ble trykt i Barn nr. 1–21989. Det er foretatt mindre layoutmessige tilpasninger til standarden for Barn. Artikkelen, som er en lett bearbeidet versjon av et foredrag som ble holdt på et seminar om barn og straff, Oslo 31.10–2.11 1984, trykkes med tillatelse fra forfatteren

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered

Bodies of emotion: rethinking culture and emotion through Southeast Asia

Feelings are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. michelle rosaldo 1984:14

Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview

In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005), I investigate how the pragmatic context of interviews can introduce a form of symbolic violence to narrative accounts. Specifically, I use the term “genre of complaint” to highlight how anthropological research interviews in biomedical settings invoke certain typified forms of suffering that call for the rectification of perceived injustices. Interview narratives articulated in the genre of complaint privilege specific types of pain and suffering and cast others into the background. Giving an account of one’s pain is thus a strategic and selective process, creating interruptions and silences as much as moments of clarity. Therefore, I argue that medical anthropologists ought to attend more closely to the institutional structures and relations that shape the production of illness narratives in interview encounters

Delitti d’onore. La storia di Fadime

Uccidere un nemico in guerra può portare onore e gloria. Ma uccidere una figlia o una sorella in tempo di pace, può essere considerato un gesto altrettanto onorabile? Fadime Sahindal è nata nel Kurdistan turco il 4 aprile 1975. È morta in Svezia, nella città di Uppsala, il 21 gennaio 2002, vittima di un delitto d’onore. È stata uccisa dal padre dopo essersi segretamente incontrata con la madre e le due sorelle più piccole, alle quali era stato vietato di vedersi con Fadime dopo che quest’ultima era stata espulsa dalla famiglia quattro anni prima, a causa di una sua relazione amorosa con un giovane svedese-iraniano, Patrik Lindesjö

Bereavement and loss in two Muslim communities: Egypt and Bali compared

The paper discusses the experimental dimension of bereavement and grief in two Muslim societies, and argues that culture more than religion shapes and organizes responses to loss. The risks to health involved, clearly conceptualized in both societies, require entirely different preventive measures at the popular health care level to accommodate to different, culturally constructed notions of self, body and interpersonal obligation. A plea for indepth studies that focus more on emotional experience in loss than on ritualized mourning is endorsed.Bali Egypt Islam death the experience of grief popular health care

Situation of Children in Bhutan: An Anthropological Perspective

In 1989 UNICEF (Bhutan) assigned Unni Wikan and Fredrik Barth who are both anthropologists to study the situation of children in Bhutan, and Bhutan Report: Results of Fact Finding Mission was submitted in 1990. That UNICEF employed anthropologists instead of medical consultants for the job in Bhutan not only reflected the sensitivity and respect of the organization towards the local culture, but also a novelty of achieving holistic understanding of the issue. Everywhere the trend has been to force a bundle of prescriptions ill-suited to the local context. This monograph is a reproduction of the above report. The publication of a 21 year old report in no way suggests a dearth of information on the situation of children in Bhutan and related issues. While much has changed after the consultants’ field visits to the villages, most of their observations and description of the underlying Bhutanese values are relevant. Despite their short interrupted field visits in Bhutan, they have succeeded the most, within the context of their assignment, in understanding Bhutan, and penetrating the deeper recess of the Bhutanese culture which otherwise does not yield easily to outside observers