Anthropology in Action

This article, co-written by a visual anthropologist (Alyssa Grossman), and a visual artist (Selena Kimball), takes the form of a collaborative and self-reflexive conversation. In it we explore how particular types of screen-mediated interactions during the COVID-19 lockdown are reconfiguring our own experiences of environmental and spatial intimacy, both within our academic research and studio practice and in broader processes of emotional, intellectual, and creative exchange. Looking through the cross-disciplinary lenses of our own longstanding friendship and collaborative working relationship, we discuss how these changed bodily perceptions of shared environments and the human interactions within them are giving rise to personal longings for the ‘spaces between’ ourselves and our surroundings, extending beyond the edges of the screen.

This article reflects on the fraught relationship between a non-autistic ethnographer and an autistic interlocutor with the goal of suggesting that the hiatus between them stems from the existing social hierarchy between neurotypical and autistic modes of communication. Drawing on anthropology of autism and critical disability studies, the article attempts to shed light on the formation of non-autistic subjectivities with the goal of suggesting that the privilege of the usage of conventional language mystifies power relations that exclude autistics from social interactions. The creation of a socially unexpected linguistic metaphor by the autistic interlocutor reveals a conflict between the use of language as an authoritative apparatus for intelligible belonging as opposed to its use as it has been rooted in experience, with all of the pain and excitement such a conflict implies.

Indigenous peoples in Canada suffer from very high suicide rates of which there are various state-created programmes and efforts to combat. However, the variety of these programmes may be limited in their conceptions of Indigenous suicide. I predicted that by analysing existing suicide prevention policies and frameworks, I would find that they systematically place Indigenous peoples in vulnerable positions through the enforcement of Western ideals of health and suicide, thus providing inadequate support towards preventing suicide. This would constitute structural violence. I used a content analysis to analyse and code themes in suicide prevention policies in Canada. I found that suicide prevention policies perpetuate structural violence as these policies overwhelmingly conceive suicide as an outcome of poor mental health, based on colonial knowledge, which is economically self-serving to the state.

In health care the appropriation of new technology to assist and improve the diagnosis, treatment, and care of patients can be challenging. Based on observations and interviews with nurses and midwives during the early implementation process of a new interactive and technologically improved patient room, this article examines how health care professionals make sense of their work in the new patient room as it becomes enacted in their everyday work practice. We find that the technologically improved room is met with some resistance by the nurses and midwives. We argue that by exploring appropriation of technology as a social process of sense-making (Weick 1995), it can be revealed how meanings assigned to the new room influences actions and interactions with it.

Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable Eviatar Zerubavel. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0-691-17736-6. 160 pp. £16.99

Civil–Military Entanglements: Anthropological Perspectives Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Eyal Ben-Ari (eds.), Oxford: Berghahn, 2019, ISBN: 978-1-78920-195-6, 324 pp., Hb £99.00.

Motor Vehicles, The Environment, and the Human Condition: Driving to Extinction Hans A. Baer, Lanham: Lexington, 2019, ISBN 978-1-7936-0488-0, 258 pp., Hb: £65.00.

Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards, Oakland: University of California Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-5202-990-47, 230 pp., Pb. £25

Tourism and Brexit: Travel, Borders and Identity Hazel Andrews (ed.), Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-84541-790-1. 244 pp.