Abstract This article explores recurring problems in post‐conflict studies of trauma through the lens of evolving discourses of psychic woundedness in post‐genocide Rwanda. Research suggests that global psychiatric discourses did not enter the Rwandan public sphere until after the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi, at which point local iterations of trauma focused on (Tutsi) survivors of the genocide. However, in recent years Rwandans have begun to use an expanded notion of trauma to analyze individual and collective responses to not only the genocide but also other forms of historical and material violence. At the forefront of this trend are Rwandan “societal healers” who study trauma at a country‐wide level. I argue that in order to overcome entrenched social divisions, societal healers deploy a “sociogenic” approach to trauma, or one that focuses on how structures of oppression produce psychic “wounds” across levels of society. Broadening their understanding of both trauma and identity, societal healers are invested in exploring how cycles of violence—physical and metaphorical—have shaped the lives of all Rwandans over time and how those cycles may end.

Abstract How does a father come to be regarded as a “family man” in the Caribbean? By tracking the stories and strivings of various Dominican men who seek recognition as dedicated fathers, this essay unfolds complex answers to this seemingly simple question. Here, the lauded ascription of “family man” is revealed less as a signifier of fatherly commitment and care than as an idiom through which masculine “respectability” is performed or denied. The paper unknots the idea of the “family man” from several ethnographic vantage points: through the moral reorientation of a felon‐turned‐loving‐father who strives for respectable recognition; observant participation with a men's group who advocate for “good fathering”; the biography of a retired police officer reflecting on parenting and being parented across shifting fatherhoods; and a youth advocate calling for more accessible masculine models. These ethnographic voices call for more expansive, historically grounded, and practice‐oriented visions of the Caribbean father and “family man” while nuancing regional concepts of respectability and building on anthropological conversations about the making of moral personhood.

Abstract According to the notion of “parental determinism,” parents are paradoxically imagined as both powerful actors and in need of expert guidance and supervision. Subsequent research in different world regions problematizes the links between parental competence, child development, and societal ills. However, the question of what “good parenting” actually consists of is highly contingent. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Ivorian parents and in a child welfare center, this paper examines competitive comparisons in baby shows, pregnancy consultations, and infant health reviews as performative parenting encounters in which parents, social welfare officers, and midwives interact as actors and audiences of “good parenting.” The paper analyzes contemporary parental determinism in Côte d'Ivoire as at once rooted in well‐established local imaginaries of self and personhood and opening spaces for the development of aspirational parental selves. It looks at different ways in which parental determinism is enacted and talked about and how “doing good” as a parent and the well‐being of children are grasped as entangled and mutually constitutive. The paper demonstrates that “beautiful babies” are a product of a shared understanding and co‐practice. Making “beautiful babies” requires communal efforts to “be good” and “do good,” invoking the subjectivities of both parents and experts alongside their acts of parenting and counseling.

Abstract The article explores how the moralization of women mothers in contemporary Brazil reinforces structural inequalities. The analysis focuses on two forms of communication: reprimands and advice directed from experts toward mothers or circulated between mothers of young children in two different social contexts in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Based upon an ethnography carried out in a complex of favelas, the first case study examines how poor and racialized women are reprimanded by public daycare professionals. Based on participant observation in a WhatsApp group of middle‐class parents, the second case study focuses on the advice distributed by parental experts that circulated among these parents in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Through the comparison of reprimands and advice, we suggest that speech acts reveal how expert discourses perform modalities of moralization that not only shape motherhood experiences but also differentiate them according to attributes of class, race, and territory.

Abstract During fieldwork among older adults in middle‐class families in the city of Bhaktapur (2018–2019), I recurrently came across comparative narratives of moral decline, depicting a stark contrast between the present time and a mythical past where ageing parents were treated “as gods.” In this paper, I analyze how, through acts of comparisons involving the weighing of opportunities between the past and the present and between difficulties facing parents and children, older people define their “moralities of expectation,” through which intimate politics of giving and taking are weighed against perceptions of hardship in the context of precarious middle‐class livelihoods. I suggest that comparison functions as a social practice with epistemological and affective connotations and that by comparing with real and imagined others, older people validate themselves as virtuous by anchoring to fluid and ever‐changing social systems. Ultimately, these findings shed light on how moral selfhoods are shaped through comparison with models of the past and the present, revealing how it is in this careful and purposeful evaluation of one's own behavior and that of others that social change is negotiated and the broader ethos revised.

Abstract This paper examines how BaYaka children from the Congo Basin learn to “walk in the forest” (botamboli na ndima). Specifically, after placing forest walking within historical and ethnographic context, we consider how this practice contributes to BaYaka motor, cognitive, and social development, and thus, to the acquisition of culture. To do so, we draw from our own observations and those of other researchers working throughout the region. We outline four ways in which “walking in the forest” is directly and indirectly socialized: through motion‐full caregiving in infancy, play and cooperative foraging in early and middle childhood, and exploration in adolescence. Taking “walking in the forest” as a focal point, we argue that the specific ways in which caregivers enhance learning are grounded in BaYaka subsistence and forest management practices, and that learning to walk in the forest is central to the maintenance of BaYaka social networks and the flow of knowledge in the Congo Basin.

In two locations in the article, the word "affect" was erroneously changed to "effect" during the production process.

Abstract This article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo‐Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double‐nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.