During COVID-19 stay-at-home orders (SaHOs), people faced drastic shifts in their work and home lives. These shifts, in combination with the temporary closure of gyms and fitness centers, led to exercise-routine disruption. We conducted a survey to assess how people were affected by SaHOs in terms of exercise-routine change, feelings about exercise, perceived physical and mental health, as well as exercise-routine plans once SaHOs were lifted. In this article, we examine why affluent white American women exercised before and during COVID-19 SaHOs. The article focuses on the role of pleasure and entertainment as key components of exercise practices for these women. We found that changes in motivation reveal that exercise regimens are part of contemporary vitality politics, or current cultural and subjective desires and abilities to manipulate and optimize biological human processes, that include both health and entertainment. Therefore, we argue that exercise is a meaningful cultural, entertainment, and biopolitical activity.

Is selfhood socially constituted and distributed? Although the view has recently been defended by some cognitive scientists, it has long been popular within anthropology and cultural psychology. Whereas older texts by Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Hazel Rose Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama often contrast a Western conception of a discrete, bounded, and individual self with a non-Western sociocentric conception, it has more recently become common to argue that subjectivity is a fluid intersectional construction fundamentally relational and conditioned by discursive power structures. I assess the plausibility of these claims and argue that many of these discussions of self and subjectivity remain too crude. By failing to distinguish different dimension of selfhood, many authors unwittingly advocate a form of radical social constructivism that is not only incapable of doing justice to first-person experience but which also fails to capture the heterogeneity of real communal life.

This case study provides a critical discourse analysis of 121 letters of complaint and self-advocacy authored by Natasha Keating, a trans woman incarcerated in two Australian male correctional facilities from 2000 to 2007. During her incarceration, Natasha experienced victimization, misgendering, microaggression, and institutional discrimination. Despite this, Natasha embodied and "fought" against the injustices she experienced, whilst seeking to speak for other trans incarcerated persons also silenced and treated with indifference, contributing to changes in the carceral system. This original case study analyzes the discursive strategies Natasha employed to construct and reclaim an affirming self-identity through a deliberate campaign to effect social change and policy concessions within a system designed to curtail self-determination. Through her empathic and impassioned letter-writing approach, leveraging a , this novel analysis showcases the significant implications her activism/agentism and determination had in naming and seeking to dismantle the systems of oppression trans incarcerated women experience.

In Luzhou, China, where grandmothers often serve as primary caregivers for infants, the past and the future haunt new mothers suffering from postpartum depression. In this article, I draw upon longitudinal interviews conducted with ten families in Luzhou as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography of postpartum depression and anxiety. I argue that the model of infant care in interior urban China accentuates the pain of depressed postpartum mothers by making it difficult for them to rid their homes of the ghosts of past trauma and lost futures. Mothers resent and fear grandmothers even as they rely on them to care for their babies. Memories of trauma, perceived displacement by the grandmother as the mother figure for their babies, and lack of control over their households and children characterize postpartum mothers' experiences. Mothers primarily blame their mothers-in-law for their unhappiness even as they depend on themselves to "self-adjust."

To explore the relationship between traditional healers and conventional psychotherapy, we conducted a combined ethnographic study and structured observational rating of healers in the middle hill region of central Nepal. We conducted in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of healing with 84 participants comprising 29 traditional healers and 55 other community members. Overall, our observations and participant responses yielded a range of interventions that improved health through belief, satisfaction in the soul, social support, transference, and symbolic narration. The findings from our overall ethnography suggest that healers offer a platform for their patients to accept a disease state, cope with it, and to experience palliation of distress. We additionally focused on one participant who saw multiple healers for a case study, during which we rated healing behavior using an observational measure of empathy, emotional validation, and therapeutic alliance. Using this measure, healers who were perceived as successful, scored high on alliance, empathy, promoting expectations of recovery, and use of cultural models of distress. The results of our structured observation suggest healers draw upon processes also observed in psychotherapy. Further research is needed to explore if these practices can be generalized to healers in other parts of Nepal and other settings. [spirituality, mental health, ethnopsychology, shamanism, mind-body relations].

In this paper we present a multidisciplinary, developmental analysis of a Dominican Republic ("Marcos"), from childhood to early adulthood, integrating ethnographic observation, field documentation, and anthropological analysis, with relevant constructs from developmental, personality, and clinical psychology. Marcos transitioned from a child with many problems to a young adult who has learnt how to control and adapt dissociative manifestations into a professional role as a Vodou priest. Most empirical studies on spirit possession (SP) have rarely taken a longitudinal, multidisciplinary approach, which may better account for such a complex phenomenon. Adopting such an approach helps make sense of both the continuity and changes in Marcos, as well as of his community's shifting attitudes towards him. We describe how specific psychological and cultural conditions help explain the change from originally dysfunctional expressions of SP to personally and socially beneficial ones. [anomalous experience, dissociation, gender, spirit possession, Vodou].

This article presents a person-centered case study of one woman's struggles to realize a meaningful sense of personhood in a low-income urban neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An analysis of longitudinal ethnographic data for this case reveals how everyday aspirations toward a morally resonant lived-sense of personhood were informed by a core assemblage of three cultural models: "providing" and "being there" as a parent and doing so within a framework of "defensive individualism". This assemblage of cultural models was particularly compelling because of a combination of the embodied residue of childhood experiences and moments of "moral breakdown" in adult life. The experiences of moral breakdown were particularly meaningful because recurrent episodes of material hardship that constantly threatened to upend past efforts to realize a meaningful sense of personhood in everyday life and, in turn, generated a constant effort to reclaim and repair the symbolic markers of an achieved personhood that had been lost. These observations point to a precariousness of personhood that seemed to further motivate an investment in a self-definition in terms of this combination of cultural models.

I performed 14 person-centered ethnographies with methamphetamine-using HIV-positive men who have sex with men in San Diego, California, who were all subjects of the "anti-meth apparatus," a collection of government and nongovernment organizations focused on meth use and its sequelae. The apparatus attempts to coerce addicts to develop and perform certain identities and emotions, though addicts are capable of both passive acceptance and active disruption. In my research, those who failed to become the apparatus's ideal subject felt shame, while those who succeeded expressed pride. Those hovering in the middle experienced a perpetual struggle to become normal and rarely, if ever, succeeded. [addiction, HIV/AIDS, subjectivity].

This article analyzes the quotidian ways that older Chicagoans remade and traversed physical boundaries between their homes and the city beyond. In so doing, it explores how changing engagements with the environment impact social personhood in later life. In a context in which personhood is equated with independence, elders relying on paid care workers to remain in their homes found themselves at the threshold of social death. To sustain their independence and personhood, older Chicagoans sought to prevent spatial and social transitions using a range of everyday tactics and material practices located around the doorways of their homes. These liminal practices simultaneously reasserted racial, class, and other social distinctions between elders, home care workers and others, helping elders continue to occupy familiar subject positions. For these older adults, homes and their thresholds became a resource with which they resisted profound changes to their daily lives, subjectivities, and social personhood.

Psychiatrists and anthropologists have taken distinct analytic approaches when confronted with differences between emic and etic models for distress: psychiatrists have translated folk models into diagnostic categories whereas anthropologists have emphasized culture-specific meanings of illness. The rift between psychiatric and anthropological research keeps "individual disease" and "culture" disconnected and thus hinders the study of interrelationships between mental health and culture. In this article we bridge psychiatric and anthropological approaches by using cultural models to explore the experience of nerves among 27 older primary care patients from Baltimore, Maryland. We suggest that cultural models of distress arise in response to personal experiences, and in turn, shape those experiences. Shifting research from a focus on comparing content of emic and etic concepts, to examining how these social realities and concepts are coconstructed, may resolve epistemological and ontological debates surrounding differences between emic and etic concepts, and improve understanding of the interrelationships between culture and health.

We examine how social demographics (gender, age, or race-ethnicity), census tract characteristics, and family environment during childhood relate to variability in the lifecourse priorities of 344 Cherokee and white youth during emerging adulthood (age 19-24). Analyses were performed using recursive partitioning and random forest methods to examine determinants of prioritizing education, family formation, economic establishment, self characteristics and close relationships, youth independence, conspicuous consumption, and community reliance. Overall, characteristics of census tracts were the most common and influential predictors of lifecourse priorities. Childhood family poverty, parental relationship problems, parental crime, and stressful life events were also important predictors. Race-ethnicity or cultural group (Cherokee vs. white), age, and gender were relatively unimportant. At this developmental stage and in this population, community characteristics and childhood family experiences may be better proxies for developmental settings (and resulting enculturated values and preferences) than social demographic variables (e.g., ethnicity or gender).

In this article I consider "narrative mind reading," the practical capability of inferring the motives that precipitate and underlie the actions of others. Following Jerome Bruner, I argue that this everyday capacity depends on our ability to place action within unfolding narrative contexts. While Bruner has focused on narrative mind reading as a within-culture affair, I look to border situations that cross race and class lines where there is a strong presumption among participants that they do not, in fact, share a cultural framework. Instead, interactions often reinforce actors' perceptions of mutual misunderstanding and cultural difference. Drawing on a longitudinal study of African American families who have children with severe illnesses, I examine narrative mind reading and misreading in one mother's interactions with the clinicians who treat her child. I further explore how narrative misreadings are supported through chart notes and "familiar stranger" stories. The focus on miscommunication grounds a theory of the reproduction of cultural difference in interactive dynamics and brings Bruner's emphasis on narrative into dialogue with contemporary anthropology of cultural borderlands.

We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential in the subfields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, especially because of his important contributions to our understanding of the intimate relationship between culture and mind. We examine Bruner's past and ongoing engagement with such luminary figures as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Alfred Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz to highlight points of convergence and tension between his version of cultural psychology and contemporary theorizing and practice in psychological anthropology. We also review his practical and theoretical contributions to the fields of medicine, law, and education.