This article explores the trace as a methodological tool and theoretical pathway in anthropology and beyond. Traces signal the limits of representation; they are the materials of knots of histories at the margins, as well as auratic presences. Through a critical reading of key ethnographic works, including an analysis of a Casa del Popolo in Rome which has been turned into a squat by Peruvian migrants, this article argues that the study of traces has an important genealogy in anthropology. This study invites us to explore the mattering of things (as forms becoming of importance), new ways of conjuring and operationalizing ethnographic 'details' and to broaden our debate of an anthropology beyond the subject, in the light of the mattering of histories.We only exist through the others who make up the storehouse of the mind: models in our first tentative steps toward identifying objects of our desires, helpers and foes. The mind is a palimpsest in which the traces of these figures will jostle and rearrange themselves for evermore. . . . we are 'peopled' by others. Our 'psyche' is a social space. (Rose, 2011: 86) This article argues for a renewed centrality of the trace in an anthropological study of materialities and historicities. By reviewing anthropology's diverse and overlapping accounts on traces, I argue that the trace helps us to explore the materiality -not only the narratives -that resides at the intersection of the seen and the unseen, sound and silence, 1 the coming into being of the social and its recession. The trace is at once an analytical tool and an ethnographic site for inquiry. However, only some ethnographic details become anthropological traces, and that is when particular lingering histories of attachments and marginalities have a material form, but cannot be conveyed by existing structures of
This article discusses some aspects of the practice of complementary and traditional medicine in urban Mexico through a transcultural paradigm, hence it focuses on how medical knowledge(s) are commodified as well as how a `travelling' medical knowledge acquires agency in a transculturation process. This study, while analysing different practices of Chinese and Japanese medicine, argues that oriental medicine is translated in at least two ways - a popular and a cosmopolitan form - that shape particular expressions of citizenship. The popular form is carried out in low-income neighbourhoods and it focuses around a `Mexicanization' of oriental medicine and the reaffirmation of the popular as part of the national. Cosmopolitan medicine, on the other hand, is particularly practised in exclusive health spas and seeks to purge the popular out of the national and to incorporate `traditional' medicine as one of the multiple components of cosmopolitan consumption. The article argues that both popular and cosmopolitan expressions are important to understanding how complementary and oriental medicine have become not only part of a global market, but also part of a particular history of national and popular medical systems.
This article analyses how otherness and a politics of affect emerge from the presence of a new Latino migration to Rome, Italy. Looking at processes around Catholic evangelisation and plural migrant itineraries, the paper argues that different and contradictory forces such as narratives of centrality and periphery are mirrored in the presence and history of the Sacred Heart. Exploring and counterposing de Certeau's ideas on migrations and mystics, and the urban as a space of enunciation, I suggest that we should explore a modality of ethnography that combines and mirrors revelatory and analytical apprehensions of the world.
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
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