Anthropology of the United States

Astrology is a feature of everyday conversation and the local spiritual scene in Sedona, Arizona, a small town renowned for its " vortexes ". As part of a variegated new age spirituality, astrology " works " in three main ways that are examined in this article. It is an explanatory model for misfortune; a symbolic system; and a source of epistemic capital. A series of well-known ethnographic studies of African divination are used to contextualise astrology as an American form of divination. Based on almost two years of participant observation fieldwork in Northern Arizona, the ethnographic material presented in this article illuminates the question of why astrology continues to be a relevant and useful practice for Americans, despite its widespread rejection by political and scientific authorities.

Scripting Addiction takes readers into the highly ritualized world of mainstream American addiction treatment. It is a world where clinical practitioners evaluate how drug users speak about themselves and their problems, and where the ideal of "healthy" talk is explicitly promoted, carefully monitored, and identified as the primary sign of therapeutic progress. The book explores the puzzling question: why do addiction counselors dedicate themselves to reconciling drug users' relationship to language in order to reconfigure their relationship to drugs?

To answer this question, anthropologist Summerson Carr traces the charged interactions between counselors, clients, and case managers at "Fresh Beginnings," an addiction treatment program for homeless women in the midwestern United States. She shows that shelter, food, and even the custody of children hang in the balance of everyday therapeutic exchanges, such as clinical assessments, individual therapy sessions, and self-help meetings. Acutely aware of the high stakes of self-representation, experienced clients analyze and learn to effectively perform prescribed ways of speaking, a mimetic practice they call "flipping the script."

As a clinical ethnography, Scripting Addiction examines how decades of clinical theorizing about addiction, language, self-knowledge, and sobriety is manifested in interactions between counselors and clients. As an ethnography of the contemporary United States, the book demonstrates the complex cultural roots of the powerful clinical ideas that shape therapeutic transactions--and by extension administrative routines and institutional dynamics--at sites such as "Fresh Beginnings."

ABSTRACT: Christian nationalism, a long-running and arguably increasingly influential political force, appears to consist mainly of an open set of affectively charged but cogni-tively underdetermined concepts and images that are capable of being constituted in a number of widely divergent forms. Despite this potential variety, the various instantia-tions of Christian nationalisms documented by the anthropology of Christianity tend to have similar features, even as they are actualized in quite different milieux and understood as being responses to quite different threats. Drawing on ethnographic work in the United States, this article argues that this recurrent crystallization of Christian nationalism into the specific form under certain conditions—the adoption of a temporally ambivalent eschatology, an ethics oriented around mimesis, and, most of all, an outward-facing ressentiment—works to self-catalyze the production of a racialized Christian nationalism that envisions itself at once as an entitled majority and as an embattled minority.

A pdf is available by request to [email protected] .  The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of organized power in organizing complex and unequal societies.  This article reviews the development of bureaucracy studies, focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats in their efforts to control the actions of others.  Then the central concept of thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels and relationships of power, with particular attention to the encompassing classifications and assumptions embodied in organizational worldviews.  The worldview of officers of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective perpetuation of undocumented labor migration.  Human rights abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes of these thought-work routines.  A stronger theoretical approach to organized power enhances applied anthropology's ability to address the behavior of state and private bureaucracies with respect to the rights and interests of nonbureaucrats.

This volume testifies to the unresolved contradictions built into both the possible solutions to the problem of the paranormal and into the controversy itself. Scientific and theoretical approaches to the field usually do not seem able to resolve the contradictions of mediumistic controversies but rather add contradictions of their own. Furthermore, they tend to forget that the core of the controversy, or rather controversies, lies in practical negotiations and negotiations about practical exigencies. That is why an ethnographic approach shows time and again how local actors use all the theoretical resources of academic life and academic reasoning available to them, and that theoretical distinctions are bound to appear highly convincing in discussions but deeply flawed on the ground. This does not mean that the theoretical controversy is particularly different from practical controversies-on the contrary, it is just one practical way of dealing with the controversies about mediumship and a strand of the controversy itself. But practical mediumism is not about resolving theoretical questions or theoretical contradictions. In fact, it may even thrive on those contradictions. Based on anthropological fieldwork in California, where I followed the controversies surrounding the testing of paranormal claims and ended up among a deeply intertwined network of parapsychologists, spiritualists, ghost hunters, and skeptics, I will present in this chapter a seemingly banal case of mediumism that remains "basic" in many senses of the term: touching the base of modern mediumism and especially spiritualism, and being nothing but basic. But even this basic case is controversial on the ground, and necessarily so. By focusing on a banal but controversial case, I will ask the complementary question: is there an equally banal basis for our theoretical controversies?

This article begins with Dr. Darby Stapp's Editorial about a recent national award for Ed Carriere, Suquamish Elder and Master Basketmaker, as well as the contents of Journal 56(1).  He gives a current state of JONA summary too. Following is the abstract for the WARC article:

The Washington Archaeological Research Center (WARC)
was established in 1972 at Washington State University (WSU) to
serve the six four-year universities and colleges, the State, and thus
the public. WARC served as a clearinghouse for government contracts,
and project assignments were made through a Scientific Committee
of archaeology faculty. Dr. Richard D. Daugherty directed WARC until
1980, when the Administrative Board, and the Scientific Committee,
redirected WARC away from contract coordination. Dr. Dale R. Croes
was appointed Director, and WARC was tasked with maintaining the
State’s site records and contract/research reports library. WARC was
also directed to create the first computer database for survey projects
and site records. WARC goals grew to include: facilitating research,
training students, and conducting public outreach. WARC soon created
an Advisory Council representing a broad collation of private contract
archaeologists; professional archaeologists from Oregon, Idaho, and
British Columbia, Canada; Native American Representatives; Federal/
State agencies; and Archaeological/Historical Societies. In many ways
it was an effort to work together, using our limited resources, to promote
archaeological interests (especially beginning to digitize, standardize,
and update our paper-based archaeological site forms)—a coordinating
of our discipline, in a form of communitarianism, based on the idea
that those involved in archaeology were essentially cooperative (“good”)
people who wanted to work together for our common goals. The WARC
newsletter, The Thunderbird with the distribution of 68 issues, serves as
the basis for outlining a chronology of our history between 1980 and 1988.

This article analyzes the hierarchy of factors in the development of crisis trends in a consolidated democracy using the example of the United States of America. The authors assess the surge of political instability in the United States, which led to the deconsolidation of the liberal democracy regime, through the prism of centrifugal processes within the American elite and the erosion of democratic institutions over the past 30 years. The main problem of the study is the contradiction between the crisis of democratic regimes in the countries of the Euro-Atlantic region and the high indicators of the factors of the consolidation of democracy, according to classical political science theories. The authors use the path analysis method to determine the main path and hierarchy of factors of erosion of the liberal democracy regime in the United States, which is an example of the "old" democracy and, according to traditional political science, is the most protected from destructive processes. Consideration of the case of deconsolidation of the liberal democracy regime in the United States, thus, sheds light on the possible ways of democracy reversion and risk factors for stability of democratic political systems.

Based on three months ethnographic fieldwork among a conservative evangelical congregation in Charleston, SC,  during the fall of 2016, this masters thesis explores the voting decisions of conservative evangelicals voters in the 2016 american presidential election. Asking the central question: "How do white Conservative evangelical Christians in Charleston, SC, make decisions about who to vote for in the 2016 presidential election? " I analyze their process of deliberating over whom to vote for as a socially informed and shaped decision. Suggesting the analytical device of an 'electoral problematic'  I explore my interlocutors' political subjectivities and reasonings over four analytical chapters which respectively foreground the major contexts of nationalism, evangelical dogma and bible reading practices, whiteness, and American national conservative politics. I draw upon Talal Asad's (2015) concept of tradition to conclude that my interlocutors voting decisions can be fruitfully understood by grasping the complexities and sophistications of the American conservative evangelical  tradition in submission to which their subjectivities and reasonings are formed.

In this article I examine the status of belief among U.S. evangelicals organizing under the moniker of the “emerging church.” As part of their cultural critique of the conservative Christian subculture, many emerging evangelicals recast their standpoint toward the role of propositional doctrine in their definition of an authentic Christian self. I join with colleagues in the anthropology of religion, in particular the anthropology of Christianity, who are rethinking the nature of belief as a form of relational commitment. I argue that emerging evangelicals seek a faith where human–human relationships are a precondition for human–divine relations to flourish. To achieve their desired sense of community emerging evangelicals create ritual structures that foster a highly relational religiosity. I illustrate this recasting of belief through analyses of narrative and institution making, grounded in three years of ethnographic fieldwork.

How do American Charismatic Evangelicals imagine human difference? Ethnographic fieldwork with the Vineyard , a Southern California originated but now nationwide Charismatic Evangelical movement, suggests that for many lay American Charismatic Evangelicals, difference is conceptualized in three different modes, involving potentialities, relations, and boundedness. Much like a grammar shapes communication without imposing a single meaning, these forms of conceiving human difference mandate no single intrinsic political position, but do affect the way that American Charismatic evangelicals express and contest notions of human difference.

Protestants mobilize objects such as 'Holy Land' flowers, Jordan River stones, vials of Dead Sea water, sand from Lake Tiberias, and Golgotha soil as potent metonymic resources, promising a kind of direct access to the scriptural past and its sacred stories. This article uses this case of biblical landscape items to reflect on the historic ambivalence that characterizes Protestant relations with religious materiality. Building on scholarship that has demonstrated the prolific role of religious materiality in Protestant ritual and everyday lifeworlds, the author extends this analysis by asking: under what conditions do Protestants experience materiality as untroubled and under what conditions is a more anxious disposition activated? To differentiate among conditions, the author proposes that it is helpful to conceptualize Protestant engagements with materiality vis-à-vis legitimized frames (e.g. pedagogy, devotion, evangelism, entertainment). Drawing together archival and ethnographic data, primarily among US Protestants, the article argues that when Protestants function within legitimized frames they are prone to embrace biblical landscape items, but when they find themselves out of frame, their engagement with this particular species of materiality becomes troubled.

The recent outburst of anti-racist protests shows how deeply the American society’s present-day problems are rooted in its past. Therefore, a study of cultural memory of the time of the Civil War, the key moment in the American nation formation, is especially important. The memory of slavery and its abolishing in the US North and South is discussed in this paper as a manifestation of the postcolonial discourse in the present-day globalized world, as a proof of validity of applying the postcolonial approach to the study of not only former colonial societies. The cultural frontier between the US North and South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in their history, first of all with respect to slavery, has not vanished but remains a cultural and sociopolitical factor in public life. By the example of complexity and inconsistency of cultural memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the North and the South manifested in their visual representations (monuments, museum expositions, etc.), the paper documents how through the collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it and determines it to a large degree. The recent events may be significant for cultural anthropology, as they show that bringing a historical perspective back to anthropo-logical research is necessary for a successful study of contemporary societies. For anthropol-ogy of the USA in particular, an academic study of these events opens prospects for reassessment of the very foundations of the American culture and society.

Anna Jabloner is an anthropologist and feminist science studies scholar, and visiting faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Her current book project, Future Pending: Californian Genomics and the Politics of Biology, is an ethnography of California through the lens of future-oriented genomic technology development. The book tracks genomics as an emerging data infrastructure that implicates Californians in a range of social engineering projects. Jabloner holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2015) and Mag.Phil. from the University of Vienna (2004).

The United States has long demonstrated a strong homogenizing value system capable of drawing its citizens away from any divisive ethnic, class, regional, racial, or religious identities.  Alternative visions have been marginalized in favor of a standard notion of America as "the land of opportunity" where old settlers and new migrants, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, black and white, Hispanics and Anglos, can participate as equals in pursuit of the shared American dream of being "all they can be." Within this shared frame of reference, Americans imagine their social universe to be, in its ideal form, based on the voluntary co-operation of autonomous co-equals.    Americans have great faith in their taken-for-granted ideals, and, like other true believers, firmly believe that everyone else would share their faith, if only they had the opportunity. That this might not be the case is felt by many Americans to be akin to blasphemy.

Alors que la majorité des recherches s'intéressant au concept de la « convivialité » ont mis l'accent sur les dimensions pragmatiques de la civilité interculturelle, nous proposons ici une exploration de ses dimensions éthico-morales, surtout son lien avec les discours cosmopolites. Cet article repose sur une étude ethnographique menée auprès des membres d'une église évangélique de Nashville, au Tennessee, qui tente de réimaginer son rayonnement social auprès des non-chrétiens (religious others). S'interrogeant sur leur éthique traditionnelle du prosélytisme, ces membres mobilisent le principe de mutualité interpersonnelle et cherchent à développer des objectifs civiques communs avec les non-chrétiens.

Nous observons que les visions sur l'idée de vivre avec la différence, soit avec les non-chrétiens, s’expriment comme une tension fragile entre les valeurs concurrentielles de leur vision de l’hospitalité, qui est à la fois évangélique et pluraliste. Plutôt que d’identifier les changements entrepris par les membres comme étant l’émergence d’une disposition cosmopolite, nous soutenons que cette ambivalence morale est un aspect constitutif d’un savoir distinct sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel. En ce sens, cet article propose une remise en question du caractère normatif du cosmopolitisme en tant que barème moral de la pensée pluraliste dans les conceptualisations anthropologiques de la cohabitation interculturelle.

En conclusion, nous proposons qu’afin de mieux comprendre les discours religieux sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel, les chercheurs se questionnent sur l’influence de la pensée cosmopolite sur le cadre conceptuel de la convivialité et envisagent un engagement plus profond avec le travail intellectuel et éthique de nos interlocuteurs, qui va au-delà de la notion d’incommensurabilité des valeurs.

The cultural frontier between the US North and the South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in their history, first of all with respect to slavery, has not disappeared up to now. It remains an important cultural and socio-political factor in public life, and “Northern”
and “Southern” character types are still recognizable. By the example of complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the USA, the paper documents how through the collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it, particularly in the form of memorials, monuments, museum expositions, and therefore determines modernity to a large degree.

Культурная граница между Севером и Югом США, образовавшаяся в результате различий в их истории, в первую очередь в связи с рабством черных, не исчезла и по сей день. Она остается значимым культурным и социально-политическим фактором
общественной жизни страны, а «северянин» и «южанин» – узнаваемыми типажами. В статье показано на примере сложности и конфликтности исторической памяти о Гражданской войне, рабстве и его отмене в США, как через коллективную память
история не просто вторгается в современность, а присутствует в ней, в т.ч. в виде мемориалов, памятников, музейных экспозиций, и в огромной степени определяет ее.

This paper explores some meaningful cultural symbols that seem to shape and frame American contemporary everyday life from an anthropological viewpoint. To do so, I put in practice ideas proposed by Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur concerning the way social reality is shaped through the unfolding of cultural signs and symbols. This process assumes the naturalization of certain truth marks that order the world and the actors’ social practices, within a fabric of shared intersubjective meanings in given socio-historical contexts. For, beginning with my everyday life experiences in Philadelphia for three years as a graduate student, I will comment about certain aspects of American culture that called my attention as a foreign anthropologist, i.e., road behavior, written signs and instructions, systems of communication, the mail, among others, that display key elements of the construction of common sense, personhood, and cultural ethics, from a perspective that combines intercultural comparison and cultural critique.

NOTE: this essay was originally presented under a different title to the Friday morning seminar at the anthropology department of the London School of Economics, and then functioned as a job talk for several years running. I had always intended to release this as an article, but this essay quickly became a creature of its time, and on top of that the demands of keeping up with the secondary literature on Foucault made revising this piece unappealing. More to the point, while the argument remained the same, my theoretical language mutated, and three works – my in-press book, and my conventionally published essays " Diagramming the Will " and " After the Denominozoic " – ended up making such a similar theoretical point. That said, there is nothing in this article I disown, and a great deal of the ethnography has never appeared anywhere else. This talk begins with the observation that the anthropology of Christianity is increasingly Foucauldian. Considering the importance that linguistic and semiotic orientated approaches have also played 1 in this newly emerged, though quickly growing, subfield, 2 the anthropology of Christianity cannot be reduced in its entirety to Foucault, but that does not take anything away from the continually escalating importance that Foucauldian conceptions of both governmentally and of ethical processes of subjectification are playing in ethnographies. This is in part due to influence of Talal Asad; while not

This article contributes to ongoing public and scholarly debates about evangelical social engagement in the United States. I illustrate that, for some conservative evangelical men, activism is fused to the cultural construction of masculinity. My central argument is that, despite becoming invested in 'new' acts of social engagement, these conservative evangelicals continue to rely on a familiar cultural script that uses individualist logics, rather than structural logics, to address social problems. My primary example is a relatively recent men's movement, Acts29, and its commitment to anti-human trafficking campaigns.

This down-to-earth examination of a few crucial moments in the formation of Triceratops skull fossils exposes the more-than-human process through which stones come into being. Anthropological/paleontological fieldwork at a quarry in the Dakota Badlands and a laboratory in Denver, Colorado reveal how fossil stones emerge through a complex and unpredictable process that involves much more than human acts of discovering and reconstructing prehistoric nature, or ascribing meaning and value to inert matter. Fossil-making involves acts of creation that are thoroughly physical and conceptual, human and nonhuman. Fossils come into being through the mixing of biological and geological forces, tools and glues, and people’s somatic and intellectual labors. This article fuses insights from the anthropology of resource extraction and a post-humanist analytic of material vibrancy in order to rethink making in more-than-human terms. Yet it also draws attention to the neglected political economy of more-than-human making by demonstrating both the asymmetric collaborations among the human and nonhuman forces, and the importance of upper-class philanthropists’ capital and middle-class volunteers’ labor, in the coming-into-being of fossils.

Opened to the public in July 2016, Ark Encounter is a creationist theme park in Kentucky. The park features an all-timber re-creation of Noah's ark, built full scale to creationist specifications drawn from the text of Genesis, as well as exhibits that imagine the Bible’s account of life before the flood.  More than merely religious spectacle, Ark Encounter offers important insights about the relationship between religion and entertainment, religious publicity and creativity, and fundamentalist Christian claims to the public sphere. 

James S. Bielo examines these themes, drawing on his unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the Ark Encounter creative team during the initial design of the park. This unique anthropological perspective shows creationists outside church contexts, and reveals their extraordinary effort to materialize a controversial worldview for the general public. Taking readers from inside the park’s planning rooms to other fundamentalist projects and diverse Christian tourist attractions, Bielo illuminates how creationist cultural producers seek to reach both their constituents and the larger culture.

The “making of” this creationist theme park, Bielo argues, allows us to understand how fundamentalist culture is produced, and how entertainment and creative labor are used to legitimize creationism.  Through intriguing and surprising observations, Ark Encounter challenges readers to engage with the power of entertainment and to seriously grapple with creationist ambitions for authority. For believers and non-believers alike, this book is an invaluable glimpse into the complicated web of religious entertainment and cultural production.

In America today, two communities with sub-Saharan African genetic origins exist side by side, though they have differing histories and positions within society. This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of those Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. Members of these groups have both a great deal in common and much that separates them, largely hidden in their assumptions about, and attitudes towards, each other. In a work grounded in extensive fieldwork Bondarenko and his research team interviewed African Americans, and migrants from twenty-three African States and five Caribbean nations, as well as non-black Americans involved with African Americans and African migrants. Seeking a wide range of perspectives, from different ages, classes and levels of education, they explored the historically rooted mutual images of African Americans and contemporary African migrants, so as to understand how these images influence the relationship between them. In particular, they examined conceptions of ‘black history’ as a common history of all people and nations with roots in Africa. What emerges is a complex picture. While collective historical memory of oppression forges solidarity, lack of knowledge of each other’s history can create distance between communities. African migrants tend to define their identities not by race, but on the basis of multiple layers of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic affinities (of which African Americans are often unaware). For African Americans, however, although national and regional identities are important, it is above all race that is the defining factor. While drawing on wider themes from anthropology and African studies, this in-depth study on a little-researched subject allows valuable new understandings of contemporary American society.

"Оттенки черного. Культурно-антропологические аспекты взаимовосприятия и взаимоотношений африкано-американцев и мигрантов из стран субсахарской Африки в США"

The book is based on the field evidence collected in 2013–2015 in more than a dozen cities and towns of seven states.

Монография основана на полевых материалах, собранных в 2013–2015 годах. В центре внимания автора – взаимовосприятие и взаимоотношения представителей двух африканских по происхождению групп населения США: существующего уже несколько столетий сообщества африкано-американцев и сложившихся в наше время диаспор выходцев из различных государств субсахарской Африки. В историко-социологическом контексте рассматриваются такие культурно-антропологические аспекты восприятия друг друга черными американцами и африканскими мигрантами, как историческая память и взаимные образы культур. Показывается влияние того, как взаимовосприятие носителей разных культур сказывается на взаимоотношениях между ними. Монография, с одной стороны, лежит в русле общих тенденций в современных антропологии и африканистике, а с другой, вносит вклад в разработку конкретной слабоизученной темы, актуальной не только для этих научных дисциплин, но и для американистики.

Perceptions of Crime," brings the questions of contraband, indigeneity, and the state squarely into the 20th century. Guatemalan police enforced the law in a bifurcated manner that both evinced and reinscribed racial categories: ladino bootleggers were ignored while Maya moonshiners and smugglers were prosecuted, further

Presentation for the National Association of Native-American Studies Conference, February 12, 2016, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Material excerpted from Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, vol. one, by Julia Gordon-Bramer (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press).

This paper examines the recent history of the United States to illustrate shifts in the ways that power and wealth are wielded and accumulated. It is argued that in recent decades the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power have intensified in this well documented societal context, and that the broad parameters of these shifts parallel contrasts elaborated by the general tenets of the dual-processual approach and broadly observed in earlier historical eras. This paper was completed before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which seemingly has afforded greater political voice and access to power to a limited few.

The purpose of this quantitative survey research study was to explore educational preferences among individuals of conservative and liberal political orientation and of both genders in the United States of America with a 13-questionnaire survey that includes questions relating to different educational preferences. The literature review has revealed previously conducted research study that suggest that individuals of conservative and liberal political orientation may have psychological differences in the domain of emotions, attention, self-control, and cognition. However, the literature review did not reveal research studies that explored educational preferences between individuals with conservative and liberal political orientation in the United States. The results suggest that statistically significant difference exists in the preference to study abroad (χ ² (1, N = 200) = 3.739, p = 0.05). Additional differences, but without a statistically significant differences, were found in the preferences to read fiction and non-fiction genre, perform physically and non-physically challenging activities, perform reading and written assignments, and study in instructional settings where ration between the teachers and technology is uneven.

Africans’ struggle for a decent social status in the USA is complicated by their frequent association with African Americans who, as a community, occupy a low social level. In the migrants’ attempts to distinguish themselves from African Americans, an important part is played by emphasizing cultural differences between the two groups. These differences serve Africans as a proof of their belonging to a different community; a positive estimation of their own culture contrary to African American supports their claims for a better social status. The source of their cultural distinction from, and superiority over African Americans, the Africans see in history of black people in and outside Africa. Based on field evidence, this paper discusses how Africans in America capitalize on the history of Africa. Africans stress that, not being descendents of slaves, they do not have inborn “slave mentality”, that they proudly feel natives of independent states while African Americans do not know where they are from. Africans frequently argue that the history of African Americans began only with the slave trade and they do not inherit the greatness of African civilizations. Most Africans believe that if there is any “black history” at all, it is nothing more than history of common sufferings of black people from white all over the world. So, the African migrants employ knowledge of history not only for claiming a decent social status but also for supporting self-identity and sense of dignity.

" The Highest Voice " and the " Inquisitors' Kiss " A chapter, let alone an edited volume, about Bakhtin and monologue may strike some as being purposefully perverse. Its man-bites-dog edge comes from the way that it appears to be a purposeful inversion of the usual Bakhtinian concerns with heteroglossia. One might further imagine that writing a monologic Bakhtinian account of social life would be theoretically rather hard sledding; or to be more exact, one might think that it might be a challenge for those academics who do not focus their studies on populations that understand themselves to be monotheists. After all, it would seem to be a fair supposition that the one area where identifying and articulating monologue should be easy is in the anthropology of Christianity, a religion that claims that Jesus is both the Truth and the Word. This is in short a baseline claim that the cacophony of voices implicit in heteroglossia seems to be the inverse of the monotheistic presumption. This also seems to be the implicit logic behind Bakhtin's statement made in Dostoevsky's Creative Work, where he stated that Christ is

This paper draws on fieldwork with American social workers, whose primary charge is to engage what they view as particularly recalcitrant human problems and populations. All the while, these workers find themselves in intensive engagements with bedbugs, which have recently infested the American imaginary, as well as the most destitute sites of American social work. As every professional effort at elimination is met with bedbugs' seeming multiplication, eradicating bedbugs comes to be understood as both professional responsibility and practical impossibility—yet another example that the magnitude of the problems with which social workers are charged exceed their abilities to resolve them. And yet these professionals neither succumb to “burnout” nor suffer a sustained sense of futility. Rather bedbugs help them cultivate a sustaining occupational ethic, one that resonates with American systems theories and American Pragmatism. More specifically, human-bedbug engagements inspire a working formulation of agency, which acknowledges the efficacies of non-human actors, understands human intention as framing of, rather than fuel for what actually happens, and privileges the means over the ends of (professional) labor. With a focus on how human-bedbug engagements contribute to the development of folk theories of agency, this paper demonstrates the fluidity with which social actors think about the possibilities for effective, meaningful (re)action and thereby contributes to the anthropology of agency.