Resilience-Peril or promise? Mapping current and future directions in the anthropology of resilience

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2260244
AutoresElise Andaya (0000-0001-7621-7466, Department of Anthropology University at Albany – SUNY Albany New York USA, autor correspondente), A Cooper (0000-0003-3354-0364, Department of Sociology and Anthropology Saint Louis University St. Louis Missouri USA)
Ano2025
Volume127
Fascículo1
Páginas80-95
Data de publicação2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.28034
OpenAlexW4405718236
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas54

Resilience is everywhere in contemporary US discourse. In this article, we map anthropological research on resilience and suggest future contributions to resilience studies. To date, anthropological work either uses resilience to describe practices of human survival in adversity or studies resilience as a policy discourse. While anthropologists have long been concerned with human adaptation to adversity, we theorize that resilience discourses hold a particular appeal to a Euro-American middle class newly affected by crisis and precarity. We offer scenes from preliminary fieldwork on resilience discourses in three domains in the United States: middle-class parenting guides, urban governance and future planning in St. Louis and New York City, and the cultural productions of Black and Indigenous activists and artists. Drawing these sites into the same analytic frame reveals how resilience discourses can serve distinct political ends, from accommodation to the status quo to qualified social reform to resistance to socially unjust systems. We conclude with a call for more synthetic and comparative research, greater clarity about the distinctiveness and benefits of resilience over other terminologies, and analyses that consider resilience as both a discourse and a ground-level experience in different global sites

Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Resilience (materials science · Sociology · Status quo · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Disaster Management and Resilience · Gender Studies · Law · Resilience and Mental Health