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This panel explores what it means to become a human person through different experiences across the life course and in diverse cultural contexts.
Long Abstract:
Different cultural settings, with their specific and also structural socioeconomic conditions, positionality vis-a-vis larger population groupings, particular histories, demographic profiles and ethnic mixes, social norms and expectations - of ideal gender and sexuality, of ethnic and class identity - shape how human subjects fashion themselves. Subject selves also change as the individual progresses through the life stages. This panel explores how different subjects, in different cultural contexts and life stages, "become somebody". While the phrase "to become somebody" often connotes the objective of young people to make something of themselves, to become a success (Luttrell 1996), we want to take a wider view, opening up interpretations of "becoming somebody" to understandings of the self as a real human, an authentic and presentable member of a group, but also shifting senses of the self according to life stage, health condition, changing position in relation to others, or the value attached to different situations. Within families, understandings of self evolve as the individual takes on new or discards long-standing responsibilities and roles, becomes carer or cared-for. With life experiences, such as the transition from school to work, the formation of a new family, a life changing illness, or the transplanting and adapting that goes with migration, the individual changes the ways they relate to others, developing new goals, presenting themselves differently, feeling new attachments, new senses of belonging, new ways of being in the world. This panel explores self formation as a social process of becoming.
This paper examines the post-school aspirations and school-to-work transitions of Marind young people in lowland southern Papua, Indonesia. Young people drop out of school early and, although they aspire to "become somebody", their opportunities for work are extremely limited.
Paper long abstract:
The Marind live in the swampy hinterland of Merauke, in the southeast of Papua Province, Indonesia. They were settled into villages through the twentieth century, but in order to forage, fish and hunt, and to collect and process their staple food, sago, they often leave the village for weeks at a time. The people in the village of fieldwork have lost perhaps one-third of their clans' territory to a huge agri-business development. Many people now augment their diet and try to accumulate cash through hunting (meat and skins) for sale, cutting timber, and selling forest produce to traders. This lifestyle is not conducive to attendance at school, so it is not surprising that literacy rates and years of schooling are very low – even by the low standard of Papua Province. Young people usually leave school early – few get as far as senior high school, and no one from the village of fieldwork has yet obtained a bachelor's degree.
This paper uses survey data, life histories and field notes from participant observation conducted during 15 months of fieldwork among the Marind, 2018-2019, to examine the aspirations of young people and their actual school-to-work transitions – their occupations and livelihoods. The phrase, "menjadi manusia" literally means "to become human", and is used throughout Indonesia to refer generally to the hope that young people will make something of themselves, and “become somebody”. We examine what it means for Marind young people to "become somebody", and how that works out in practice.
This paper examines how the younger generation in southwest China construct and practice the identity politics through hot pot consumption. It argues that hot-pot eating is a critical method for articulating identities as a local and constructing distinctions in different cultural contexts.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper examines how the younger generation from Sichuan Province construct and practice the identity politics through hot-pot consumption. Sichuan is home to hot-pot with spicy dishes. It highlights how the young who migrated to other places embodies the 'eating habitus' and narrates the 'traditions' in non-local contexts. Moreover, this paper underpins discussions on the interplays between the articulation of hot-pot culture and identity politics amongst the young. It argues that hot pot eating is a critical method for not only articulating identities as a Sichuan local, but also constructing distinctions in different cultural contexts.
This paper uses ‘kinscripts’ to explore the forms of and influential factors towards sibling relationships. Findings show that sibling relationships are variable in the process of the second child’s growing up; the large age gap, gender and family background all play a role in it.
Paper long abstract:
As of the release of the three-child policy in 2021, the sibling relationships in China have attracted intensive attention within and outside the academia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with six first kids who all have significant age difference with their younger brother, or sister, this paper uses ‘kinscripts’ as theoretical perspective to explore the forms of and influential factors towards sibling relationships in these sample families. Findings show that sibling relationships of two children families are variable with a certain degree of intimacy in the process of the second child’s growing up: when the second child is young, sibling intimacy takes the form of "child rearing", with emotional closeness mostly; when the second child goes to school, sibling intimacy increases educational relationship and decreases the emotional interaction. At the same time, the large age gap and gender make sibling intimacy manifest itself in "homogenized intimacy” and “heterogeneous intimacy”, and they also reinforce gender stereotypes when sibling interact with each other; the large age gap and family background play a role in sibling relationship, which make "child rearing" presents two different characteristics: "entertainment" and "parentalization". Sibling with large age gap does not have conflicts caused by competition for educational resources, on the contrary, the first child will be based on their own cultural capital to help the younger one.
This paper considers the ‘colonial imagination’ and changing perceptions of lifestyle migrants in the Philippines. It asks how lifestyle migrants’ understandings of Other are reproduced through interactions with the local community; and how relationships are contoured by surfing communities.
Paper long abstract:
Western lifestyle migrants to former colonies bring with them imaginings of the host destination, and by extension the host societies, which are informed by patterns of past colonial and current neo-colonial relationships. Anthropological literature on this form of lifestyle migration shows that such migration typically does not lead to a re-orientation of colonial imaginings through increased interactions but rather, through selective interactions, actually strengthens such perceptions. This paper focuses on the changing perceptions of lifestyle migrants living in a rural fishing-turned-surf tourism village on Siargao Island, Philippines. I begin with the question: how is the ‘colonial imagination’ and associated perceptions of Other coloured by and reproduced through lifestyle migrants’ experiences of and interactions with the local community? In answering this question, I consider how lifestyle migrants perceive time and work ethics in the Philippines. I then draw upon the notion that different types of relationships form in tourist locations, and consider how some relationships and affective experiences may foster deeper and increasingly nuanced understandings of the host society. In considering lifestyle migrants’ perceptions of and changing attitudes towards the local Philippine people, I focus on surf culture and community. I explore the role of surfing’s ‘collective consciousness’ (Stranger 2011) in transcending social differences and promoting understanding; and how surfing’s ‘shared intensity’ promotes intimacy in masculine spaces (Green and Evers 2020), even as such understanding and intimacy may be bounded by the parameters of the surf community.
The notion of ‘becoming somebody’ assumes a creative, socially-valued process. But what does it mean in reverse, when ‘somebody’ becomes ‘nobody’? The experience of unbecoming confronts people diagnosed with dementia, creating justifiable fears which play out differently in different places. My focus is the Australian aged care system, in particular residential care places to which people with dementia are consigned.
Paper long abstract:
The notion of ‘becoming somebody’ assumes a creative, socially-valued process. But what does it mean in reverse, when ‘somebody’ becomes ‘nobody’? The experience of unbecoming confronts people diagnosed with dementia, creating justifiable fears which play out differently in different places. My focus is the Australian aged care system, in particular residential care places to which people with dementia are consigned. In that system, what one person has described as our dementia prisons, neglect, which in turn legitimises chemical restraint, hastens unbecoming. The extent of this horror was revealed in the 2021 Royal Commission into Aged Care.
Fear of dementia is not about the unbecoming associated with death, physical disability, or even terminal illness. It confronts us with a very specific kind of unbecoming, an unravelling of being. Family are encouraged to see themselves as ‘losing’ their partner, parent or grandparent. The people for whom that person has been a somebody are confronted with a choice – to adapt to the changes dementia brings, or to turn away. Medical and health professionals assume family will not cope and may encourage them to turn away: let paid professionals take that person through their process of unbecoming. They do this within ‘residential aged care’, often a euphemism for abandonment.
Referring to Brazilians abandoned by family and society, Biehl (2012) points out that ‘the abandonment of unproductive and unwanted family members is facilitated and legitimated by drugs, both through the scientific truth value they bestow and through the chemical alterations they occasion … Pharmaceuticals thus work as moral technologies – they actually make the loss of social ties irreversible’. I use an Australian case study to illustrate this: about a wife’s attempts to prevent her husband being medicated, and how she unsuccessfully resists attempts to force her to abandon him. Abandonment is not only facilitated and legitimated by drugs, it is also facilitated by medical elitism, ageism and sexism – and by the imaginaries of what constitutes a ‘somebody’.
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