In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

Abstract

This year-in-review article places 2020 sociocultural works within the portal formed by pandemic loss.Moving in the mode of Black feminist praxis, the article stays with wake work (Sharpe) as an analytic to consider articles and born digital media for how they were moved by the situated practices and affects produced through dying from normality and the horizons they summon and grieve. Specifically, Sharpe's formulation of wake work as a labor of vigilant attendance is upheld as a method for how anthropology might mourn the dead while reckoning with Black being in modernity. Prevalent keywords from popular discourse in 2020 organize the article conceptually, putting the force of public debates around "preexisting conditions," "law and order," "staying at home," and being "all in this together" to bear on anthropological analyses of patriarchy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.

A poetics of living rebellion: Sociocultural anthropology in 2021

“…From the space of languishing, grief, and efforts to forge collective care, anthropology in 2021 gleaned grounded insights into the quotidian social practices of living, loving, and mourning (Berry 2021). How do we understand the space of survival or practices of livingness as rebellion?…”

“…This refusal of the terrain of participation circumscribed by the state and in seemingly inclusive and beneficial sustainability projects (Greenleaf 2021) evidence further how anticipatory grief has potential for mobilizing resistance. In the face of slow death and dying, “it means there is hope” (Rodríguez Aguilera 2021, 11).…”

“There Would Be More Black Spaces”: Care/giving Cartographies during COVID‐19

“…First, they add texture to narratives of care/giving to further elucidate life‐affirming practices alongside and despite racial violence. Second, as an alternative spatial practice, counter‐maps resonate with what Maya Berry (2021) discusses as “portals” (i.e., openings toward “a fundamental reorientation of the kinds of projects that anthropologists pursue and what forms of knowledge count ”) (p. 12; see also Agbe‐Davies 2020). Through their production—a process that entails the elicitation of caring labor—counter‐maps may reveal the possibilities for futures without racial oppression.…”

Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human–Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care

“…Globally, we see that all species, including our own, now disparately live, age, and die together in landscapes reflecting past and ongoing environmental degradation driven by racial capitalism. Remaking these environmental conditions and our care systems will require feminist, antiracist, mournful, and otherwise ways of doing anthropology (Berry 2021;Parreñas 2018) that focus on our entangled multispecies histories (Tsing et al 2019) and care for nonhuman beings (Münster et al 2021).…”

“…44Consider the name changes of Anthrodendum and the Association for Queer Anthropologists, the CiteBlackWomen Collective, and debates within AAA Communities and beyond about racism in the history's discipline and today (Baker 2021; Berry 2021). …”