Trnka
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 8718 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Trnka |
| APELLIDO | Trnka |
| FIRMA | TRNKA |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Auckland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4779-8035 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 217 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 64 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Cities as Atmospheric Infrastructures
Cities and the activities urban infrastructures enable have long been noted for making demonstrable impacts on the surrounding atmosphere. Cities also provide unique social and political infrastructures, promoting particular forms of cohesion and fracture, including opportunities for promoting political consciousness and inspiring collective activism. This paper introduces the concept of ‘atmospheric infrastructures’ to examine both of these face…
Production of knowledge
Guns and gun violence (part 2)—Desires and dangers of emergent firearm assemblages
According to the Small Arms Survey, there are 120.5 privately owned guns for every 100 civilians in the United States—the world's highest rate of gun ownership. What are the consequences of this? How does the vast number of guns, both concealed and openly carried, frame everyday American fears, anger, and suspicion? In this interview, Jason Pribilsky and Charles Springwood tackle these issues by examining the empirical status of gun violence, as …
Peripheral Vision As a Method for Anthropological Knowledge Production
The concept of the peripheries is integral to how socio-cultural anthropology produces knowledge. Specifically, it is central to the discipline's trademark ethnographic method. This chapter draws from historical and contemporary anthropological theory to examine the significance of “peripheral vision” in the discipline. In the process, I outline three contributions that anthropology's use of the ethnographic method can make to conceptualizations …
What is an author
How is artificial intelligence altering our understandings of academic authorship? While the uptake of AI might appear to require a radical revisioning of our notions of authorship, in fact, it highlights long‐standing notions of collective and individual authorial responsibility, as demonstrated through the first human engagements with the ELIZA computer program. Pitched in the 1960s as AI capable of engaging in psychoanalytic interviews, ELIZA …
Influence from the margins
Shortly after Super Bowl LX, in which Bad Bunny headlined the most‐watched halftime show in Super Bowl history, the editors of American Ethnologist sat down to interview anthropologists Crystal Abidin (author of books including TikTok and Youth Cultures and Child Influencers: How Children Become Entangled with Social Media Fame ) and Vanessa Díaz (author of the books Manufacturing Celebrity and P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Pu…
Anthropological authorship in the age of generative AI
Guns and gun violence (part 1)—global perspectives
Gun violence is widespread around the globe, but the messages conveyed by its various manifestations, as well as by guns themselves, are deeply specific, both socially and historically. In this interview, Ieva Jusionyte and Godfrey Maringira discuss their research on gun violence in the US, Mexico, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Recalling their own experiences with firearms—carrying them, firing them, and being thre…
Gender and global politics
From the Cold War to the manosphere
Since the end of the Cold War and the rise of new right‐wing political movements across Europe, the US, and elsewhere, gender has taken on heightened political and social significance. To better understand this phenomenon, AE ’s editors interview two specialists on contemporary gender: Greg Downey, a psychological anthropologist, and Kristen R. Ghodsee, an ethnographer and historian of socialist and postsocialist women's struggle for equal rights…
In the wake of the Dobbs decision
In August 2025, the editors of American Ethnologist interviewed anthropologists Khiara M. Bridges and Angel M. Foster about reproductive justice, activism, and scholarship in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which eliminated the federally protected right to abortion in the United States. Bridges and Foster both have forthcoming books that discuss reproductive rights and justice fr…
The agenda is to wipe out critical thought'-Struggles for academic freedom (part 2)
In the second of two interviews with leading anthropologists focused on academic freedom, the editors of American Ethnologist speak with Eve Darian-Smith (University of California, Irvine) and Virginia R. Dominguez (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). Darian-Smith recently published Policing Higher Education, and Dominguez has addressed academic freedom through her work with the World Anthropological Union and the International Union of Ant…
How to write for American Ethnologist
What makes for a successful submission to American Ethnologist? As with article submissions to any anthropological journal, there are several measures you can take to strengthen your article's chance of success. First, produce a well-written manuscript with a clearly articulated thesis. Second, know your journals: Is AE really the best venue for your work? Third, entice editors and reviewers with a compelling title and abstract. At the revision s…
Struggles for academic freedom (part 1)
In the first of two interviews on the issue of academic freedom, the editors of American Ethnologist interviewed Hayal Akarsu, president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and Heath Cabot, president of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, about the restrictions faced by scholars and students in Europe and beyond. In a wide-ranging discussion, Akarsu and Cabot consider historical cycles of repression, surveilla…
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy
From the White House to Zimbabwe
Affective Cartographies of Collective Blame
In both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, COVID-19 lockdowns were enforced through public scrutiny of the movements of supposedly ‘irresponsible’ individuals. Denouncing their impact on public health created an affective cartography of collective blame uniting State and society in shared moral indignation. Produced through assemblages of mainstream and social media and government statements, such mediated spectacles engendered a sense of collec…
Competing Responsibilities and the Ethics of Care in Young People’s Engagements with Digital Mental Health
Community healthcare workers' experiences during and after Covid‐19 lockdown
Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic reached Aotearoa New Zealand, stringent lockdown measures lasting 7 weeks were introduced to manage community spread of the virus. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study examining how lockdown measures impacted upon the lives of nurses, midwives and personal care assistants caring for community-based patients during this time. The study involved nationwide surveys and in-depth interviews with 15…
Reconsidering the Declaration of 'Crisis' While Living through One
What counts as a 'crisis'? How do we determine an 'emergency'? Who gets to do so, and what exactly is at stake? Scholarly examinations of 'crises', including, most notably, seminal work by Janet Roitman (2013), frequently underscores how the 'crisis imaginary' is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand State power. Certainly, State responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have amply demonstrated this critique, as was noted early on by both Agamben…
The Research Imagination During Covid-19
This article explores some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a collective critical event for anthropologists and other social scientists, examining how it has promoted new configurations of the research imagination. We draw on our own experiences of participating in a team of 17 researchers, hailing from anthropology and anthropology-adjacent disciplines, to research social life in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the pandemic, …
States Reimagined
Shifting public imaginaries have played a vital role in shaping government and citizen responses to COVID-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand. During the nation's first COVID-19 lockdown, the general public expressed support, and at times even enthusiasm, for strict measures put in place to curb the spread of the virus. Less than a year later, what had begun as a nationalistic rallying cry to 'unite together' and 'be kind' while 'combatting COVID-19' took…
Re-imagining Time in the Midst of Crisis
Popular films often depict pandemics in apocalyptic ways, temporally portraying how day by day, fear increases as a virus takes over the world. The speed of transmission, alongside the virus’s seemingly unstoppable global spread, evoke a sense of being engulfed by the extraordinary, creating an experience of time characterised by feelings of intensity and fear, both on and off-screen. In contrast, the lived realities of young New Zealanders durin…
“PM me” or “LOL”
‘Safer communities … together’? Plural policing and Covid-19 public health interventions in Aotearoa New Zealand
International media have praised Aotearoa New Zealand for its response to the coronavirus pandemic. While New Zealand Police played a fundamental role in enforcing pandemic control measures, the policing landscape remained plural. This article employs Loader [2000. Plural policing and democratic governance. Social and legal studies, 9 (3), 323–345] model of plural policing to understand responses to public health emergencies. It identifies two fo…
Competing Responsibilities
Ideas of responsibility pervade social life, underpinning forms of governance, subjectivities, and collective relations. Inspired by current analyses of neoliberal projects of 'responsibilisation', this paper examines modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or co-exist with neoliberal ideals. Our aim is twofold: first, we wish to broaden current scholarly understandings of how neoliberal 'responsible' subjects are nested within multiple f…
Specters of Uncertainty
On May 19, 2000, armed rebels stormed the Fiji Parliament, unleashing months of political turmoil and military and civilian violence. Indo-Fijians were among the hardest hit as racial violence targeting their communities spread rapidly across the nation. Among the variety of their responses to these traumatic events were moments of spontaneous joking and laughter. In this article I examine how, in a time of intense fear and confusion, a sense of …
L'enfer, c'est les autres
During the COVID-19 emergency, people around the world are debating concepts like physical distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. The ethical significance of proximity-that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (Strathern 2020)-is thus being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships. Through five case studies from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States…
Multi-sited therapeutic assemblages
This paper draws together work on therapeutic assemblages, geographic assemblages, and therapeutic landscapes to develop the concept of "multi-sited therapeutic assemblages." Assemblage theory has been productively used in health research since it achieved prominence in the social sciences two decades ago. One facet that, however, remains as yet under-developed in the literature on "therapeutic assemblages" (as well as their close kin, "health as…
Be Kind
Citizens do not merely respond to states of emergency; in democratic societies, they help constitute them. This essay analyzes New Zealanders' engagements in ethical reasoning during the country's first COVID-19 lockdown. Specifically, I examine how we can understand a variety of public responses to emergency measures-including breaching regulations, threatening rule-breakers, sealing off neighborhoods, and recasting citizen-returnees as "strange…
Domestic Experiments
In this article, I examine the self-positioning of many New Zealand mothers of children with asthma as parent-experts whose authority supersedes that of implementing the self-management strategies advocated by medical professionals. In a socio-political context that emphasizes neoliberal values of autonomy and self-responsibility, these parent-experts experiment with a variety of pharmaceutical regimes, determining familial modes of care that pri…
Languages of Labor
Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how "real" and 'unreal' pai…
Infantographies
From lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows
Scholarly examinations of states of emergency frequently underscore how the crisis imaginary is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand state power. This line of analysis affords great insight into the misuse of state power. It also, however, tends to depict the citizenry as either weak and overwhelmed or at best, duped by the workings of the state, and thus ignores the possibility of democratic processes continuing within a state of emergen…
Living a Life of Sex and Danger
The Research Imagination During Covid-19
This article explores some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a collective critical event for anthropologists and other social scientists, examining how it has promoted new configurations of the research imagination. We draw on our own experiences of participating in a team of 17 researchers, hailing from anthropology and anthropology-adjacent disciplines, to research social life in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the pandemic, …
States Reimagined
Shifting public imaginaries have played a vital role in shaping government and citizen responses to COVID-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand. During the nation's first COVID-19 lockdown, the general public expressed support, and at times even enthusiasm, for strict measures put in place to curb the spread of the virus. Less than a year later, what had begun as a nationalistic rallying cry to 'unite together' and 'be kind' while 'combatting COVID-19' took…
(Alter)narratives of ‘winning’
COVID-19 stories, especially from Aotearoa New Zealand as one of the leading nations ‘winning’ over the virus will be important historical documentation. The ‘team of 5 million’ is writing its narratives of life with/out COVID-19 – stories of ‘living in bubbles’, of ‘being kind’ and ‘being in it together.’ These are narratives of success which need to be examined alongside the narratives that have been absent from public national discourse but co…
Equality, efficiency and effectiveness
A. L. Cochrane's Effectiveness and Efficiency frequently appears as a key reference in debates over, and a justification for, contemporary evidence‐based medicine. Cochrane's concern in this text with the equality of care as the ultimate rationale for why effectiveness and efficiency of cure are needed has, however, largely disappeared from debate. In this article, we reconsider Cochrane's approach through the use of case studies of plural forms …
Memory, imagination, and belonging across generations
The last two decades have witnessed a phenomenal expansion of scholarly work on collective memory. Simultaneously, increasing anthropological attention is being paid to collective visions of the future, albeit through a range of disparate literatures on topics including development, modernity and risk, the imagination, and, perhaps ironically, nostalgia. In this introduction to this special section, we bring together analyses of postsocialist vis…
Cleanliness in a Caste-less Context
Despite the near elimination of caste in Fiji, Indo-Fijian Hindus widely adhere to pollution ideologies that were once associated with caste hierarchies. In this paper, I analyse how such ideologies have been transformed from demarcating caste status to indexing Hindu identity. Examining a hotly contested community debate that took place when members of a Hindu devotional singing group in Fiji were accused of praying while being ‘unclean’, I argu…
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy
Re-imagining Time in the Midst of Crisis
Popular films often depict pandemics in apocalyptic ways, temporally portraying how day by day, fear increases as a virus takes over the world. The speed of transmission, alongside the virus’s seemingly unstoppable global spread, evoke a sense of being engulfed by the extraordinary, creating an experience of time characterised by feelings of intensity and fear, both on and off-screen. In contrast, the lived realities of young New Zealanders durin…
Efficacious Holidays
As evidence-based medicine has increasingly become the standard for assessing the efficacy of health care, the Czech Republic finds itself in a dilemma, with centuries of sanatorium-style spa treatments resisting easy categorization. Despite some critics' contentions that spas are "pointless holidays" and reductions in government funding of health spas, in 2014 Czech courts affirmed every Czech citizen's right to spa treatments if their health st…
Pollution and Intimacy in a Transcendent Ethics of Care
In India, where children's care of ageing parents is seen as practical and sacred, animated by notions of seva (selfless service), the outsourcing of elder care causes considerable concern. Meanwhile, carers' work in old-age homes is treated as transactional, and their moral claims about this work are either overlooked or criticised. While gendered, socio-economic circumstances compel the women we discuss in this paper to care-work at an old-age …
Peripheral vision as anthropological critique
In the context of rapid neoliberal reform, both anthropology as a discipline and the social and cultural phenomena it studies are undergoing profound changes. In this article we develop June Nash's concept of "peripheral vision" to show how peripheries, and the politics of "peripheralization", can illuminate processes of neoliberalization and the implications that this has for anthropological knowledge production. We argue that anthropology is un…
Forgotten pasts and fearful futures in Czechs' remembrances of communism
Twenty years after the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, numerous public and private acts of remembrance both hail the end of state socialism and rally Czech society to be on guard against its possible return. This article compares three sets of remembrances-official commemorations sponsored by the state and/or private corporations, activists' alternative memory acts, and personal accounts of Czech citizens-to reveal how each of these give…
Becoming 'Half a Doctor
In New Zealand, familial responses to childhood asthma largely pivot around the role of the parent-expert who takes primary responsibility for both the management and normalisation of their child’s condition. Based on a preliminary analysis of cultural texts and interviews with parents, healthcare professionals, representatives of asthma societies and environmental activists, this paper argues that childhood asthma is largely accepted as being a …
My God, My Land
Living a Life of Sex and Danger
Land, Life and Labour
Since the coup of May 2000 an estimated 24,000 Indo‐Fijians have left Fiji, the majority of them moving to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Those who remain in Fiji have faced increasing marginalisation as the government of Prime Minister Qarase has proposed significant reforms to both the administration of land and Constitutional arrangements of political representation. The situation has been further compounded through Qarase's recent…
Bodily Translations
An extensive literature exists on the relationships between body pain, language, and social communication, much of it focused on the disparities between patient experiences and medical classifications of 'real' pain. A similar tension exists in Fiji where medical personnel in public clinics routinely contend that Indo-Fijian women patients complain of, but do not 'really' experience, body pain. This paper examines translations of women's complain…
Languages of Labor
Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how "real" and 'unreal' pai…
The Jungle and the City
Re‐mythologizing the State
My primary concern is with tracing how the police force has been transformed from a secular institution into an overtly religious one. Drawing from scholarly work on charismatic leadership and its routinization in institutional forms, much of it inspired by Max Weber's early work on these themes, my overarching aim is to grapple with the significance of Commissioner Teleni's reforms not only for the Fiji police force but more broadly for the shap…
My God, My Land
Suffering and Sentiment
Specters of Uncertainty
On May 19, 2000, armed rebels stormed the Fiji Parliament, unleashing months of political turmoil and military and civilian violence. Indo-Fijians were among the hardest hit as racial violence targeting their communities spread rapidly across the nation. Among the variety of their responses to these traumatic events were moments of spontaneous joking and laughter. In this article I examine how, in a time of intense fear and confusion, a sense of …
Tahiti beyond the Postcard
Becoming 'Half a Doctor
In New Zealand, familial responses to childhood asthma largely pivot around the role of the parent-expert who takes primary responsibility for both the management and normalisation of their child’s condition. Based on a preliminary analysis of cultural texts and interviews with parents, healthcare professionals, representatives of asthma societies and environmental activists, this paper argues that childhood asthma is largely accepted as being a …
Cleanliness in a Caste-less Context
Despite the near elimination of caste in Fiji, Indo-Fijian Hindus widely adhere to pollution ideologies that were once associated with caste hierarchies. In this paper, I analyse how such ideologies have been transformed from demarcating caste status to indexing Hindu identity. Examining a hotly contested community debate that took place when members of a Hindu devotional singing group in Fiji were accused of praying while being ‘unclean’, I argu…
Forgotten pasts and fearful futures in Czechs' remembrances of communism
Twenty years after the end of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, numerous public and private acts of remembrance both hail the end of state socialism and rally Czech society to be on guard against its possible return. This article compares three sets of remembrances-official commemorations sponsored by the state and/or private corporations, activists' alternative memory acts, and personal accounts of Czech citizens-to reveal how each of these give…
Memory, imagination, and belonging across generations
The last two decades have witnessed a phenomenal expansion of scholarly work on collective memory. Simultaneously, increasing anthropological attention is being paid to collective visions of the future, albeit through a range of disparate literatures on topics including development, modernity and risk, the imagination, and, perhaps ironically, nostalgia. In this introduction to this special section, we bring together analyses of postsocialist vis…
Domestic Experiments
In this article, I examine the self-positioning of many New Zealand mothers of children with asthma as parent-experts whose authority supersedes that of implementing the self-management strategies advocated by medical professionals. In a socio-political context that emphasizes neoliberal values of autonomy and self-responsibility, these parent-experts experiment with a variety of pharmaceutical regimes, determining familial modes of care that pri…
Competing Responsibilities
Ideas of responsibility pervade social life, underpinning forms of governance, subjectivities, and collective relations. Inspired by current analyses of neoliberal projects of 'responsibilisation', this paper examines modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or co-exist with neoliberal ideals. Our aim is twofold: first, we wish to broaden current scholarly understandings of how neoliberal 'responsible' subjects are nested within multiple f…
C zechs
The Czech nation was born out of a nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century “national revival” movement ( národní obrození ) whose proponents portrayed themselves as “awakening” long dormant, primordial Czech identities that had been suppressed through centuries of foreign rule. Two hundred years later, the revivalists' efforts continue to inspire national sentiment but the political–economic, social, and cultural contexts out of which national id…
Playing cowboys and Indians
The term nostalgia was initially coined to describe a newly recognized form of homesickness so acute it was considered often fatal. Over time, the medicalized origins of nostalgia have disappeared and it would be unthinkable today to find medical professionals diagnosing patients with this condition. Nonetheless, contemporary usage of the term continues to reverberate with negative overtones, often suggesting suffering, melancholy or loss. This a…
Up close and personal
Suffering, Selfhood and Anthropological Encounters Michael Jackson Chapter 2. Anthropology, Ontology and the Maori World Anne Salmond Chapter 3. Building Bridges: Maori and Pakeha Relations Joan Metge Chapter 4. 'Culture', 'Race' and 'Me': living the anthropology of Indigenous Australians Gillian Cowlishaw Chapter 5. Finding One's Way in Arnhem Land Nicolas Peterson Chapter 6. Art as Action: The Yolngu Howard Morphy Chapter 7. Rethinking Nature a…
Peripheral vision as anthropological critique
In the context of rapid neoliberal reform, both anthropology as a discipline and the social and cultural phenomena it studies are undergoing profound changes. In this article we develop June Nash's concept of "peripheral vision" to show how peripheries, and the politics of "peripheralization", can illuminate processes of neoliberalization and the implications that this has for anthropological knowledge production. We argue that anthropology is un…
An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World
"An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge." The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 16(3), pp. 303–304
Digital Care
This paper draws from interviews with 21 young New Zealanders, ages 16-24, to examine how health apps shape young people’s experiences of themselves as agentive subjects in relation to their physical and mental wellbeing. Focusing on the intended and unintended effects of health apps, I examine how digital care technologies recast the spatiality and temporality of healthcare, enabling new ways of constituting and tracking health, expanding possib…
Diagnostic refusals, temporality, and subjectivity among “non-compliant” sufferers of asthma
Reshaping the Landscape of Care
This article considers the ethical implications of health apps, focusing on how digital technologies create new temporalities of care for the self and for others. Drawing on our own experiences of engaging in digital care, we examine how apps that focus on mood/emotion tracking, mental health, meditation, and other forms of stress-relief reconfigure inter-relationality. Recasting how information is shared as well as the temporal possibilities of …
Social group dynamics predict stress variability among children in a New Zealand classroom
Sociology (43 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Psychology (22 obras) · Medicine (18 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · History (15 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras)