This special issue, entitled “Ethnographic Encounters with Absurdity”, highlights contradictions and nonsensicalities found in power structures, mostly in state bureaucratic contexts and, in some articles, in their intertwinement with market logics. “Absurdity”, as Mirco Göpfert argues in the afterword, “often helps us glimpse at something essential about how power operates today”, including in our everyday lives as academics and as active citizens. For this reason, it becomes not “simply something [good] to think with”, but “something we must learn to fight.”

This special issue begins from the premise that structures of power are riddled with contradictions, paradoxes and absurdities. We examine how their effects are apprehended and responded to across diverse ethnographic contexts by people whose livelihoods are bound up with such formations. To do this, we use the term ‘absurdity’ as a broad heuristic, paying careful attention not only to local terms used to express dissonances between longed for moral social orders and actual experiences, but also to multisensory apprehensions of a world that is out of kilter, opaque or simply inscrutable. Responses to such absurdities range from a pervasive sense of futility, speculative reasoning and quiet endurance to despair, satire or the fabrication of fake or absurd documents to navigate impossible demands. We suggest that staying with experiences of absurdity can reveal the moral and material contours of ordinary worlds that have been affronted or disabled.

Rural public servants in Ethiopia are responsible for enacting policies that are subject to competing and contradictory demands, and that often do not accord with people's existing priorities. Referring to the riddling Amharic language game of enkokilish, government workers described their work as like a game: repetitive, unproductive and not grounded in reality. This article will look at how initiatives to improve sanitation under the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front government, in concert with international development actors, resulted in different registers of absurdity, from attempts at fomenting humiliation among rural populations to the fake latrines that studded the landscape of North Shewa to the production of invented statistics. These performances of compliance from both local people and government workers are not merely spectacle but affected how the state is experienced by those who work for it, and how it is perceived by its citizens.

In a health system shaped by decades of imposed austerity, operating with scarce resources and catering for citizens living in economic precarity and poverty, young doctors in a Kenyan public hospital found their everyday work frustrating and at times futile. Here I attend to situations that engulf a sense of personal integrity and morality, where opportunities, options and choices to develop other forms of meaningful practice remain limited. I explore how doctors encountered, interpreted and navigated these situations and how they refused and protested them, through improvisation, wry humour, solidarity and civility, as well as indifference and cynicism, anger and outrage. Their attempts to locate the absurd in their experiences of failure allowed them, at times, to distance themselves from failure and to refuse such endings. However, experiencing repeated failures also led to exhaustion and sense of moral defeat, and many hoped to leave public service despite their commitments to patients.

How do people make life meaningful amid institutions that have ceased to function? This article examines how railway workers in Mali navigate the paradox of working for a company the state declared had never legally existed. Amid halted trains, irregular wages and opaque governance, workers experienced a profound sense of absurdity shaped by the decaying infrastructure of the Dakar-Bamako railway and broken promises of renovation. Such uncertain grounds fuelled speculative practices, ranging from conspiratorial narratives to horse betting and the repurposing of old skills, through which workers responded to precarious circumstances. These practices critiqued hollow government assurances while foregrounding temporal entanglements, as uncertain futures spilled into the present and the colonial past resurfaced. Framing speculation as a means of forging solidarity and reclaiming agency, the article shows how workers rendered disorienting conditions liveable through gambling, gossip and reinvention.

In Cuba, the government inspires fear among citizens because of its capacity to discipline and punish, but also laughter for its tendency to make ridiculous declarations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana, this article examines the political origins of two types of experiences of absurdity in Cuba: perplexing statements from official leaders and legal regulations that are so opaque that people struggle to understand them. Both kinds of absurdity emerge from people's inability to read commonsense logic into state actions. Although government decisions and declarations may blatantly contradict popular understanding, they are rarely criticised openly in the official public domain. Rather, critique is reserved for the confines of people's homes, or in semi-private online spaces. But while fear may suppress public debate, laughter is never far away. The restricted nature of Cuban political discourse creates fertile ground for comedy to expose the absurdity at its core.

This article describes the migratory experience of Merule, an undocumented Nigerian citizen living at the centre of two different but complementary rules regulating migration to Italy. He entered the country legally but fell into irregularity three years later. In 2020, he enrolled in a state-led regularisation programme. Merule's situation uncovers some paradoxical effects of the Italian migration regime, which appear absurd to those stuck in it. First, the path to legal status demands informal or illegal practices and false declarations about one's condition. Second, bureaucracy works as governance at a distance, exacerbating applicants’ suffering and anxiety. Third, a legal pathway designed to last only a few months results in a years-long wait, which places applicants in legal limbo with reduced space for individual agency.

This article examines the repeated encounters young civil society activists in the city of Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, have with a public hi-fi system playing music for an empty traffic intersection and their choice to describe this roundabout as absurd. I read these claims as symptomatic of uncanny dynamics in Kuchingite urbanity. Deploying the language of absurdity helps my interlocutors evade political risk by constructing strategic ambiguities. Through a Derridean analytic of speech acts I articulate how these ambiguities serve pragmatic ends. My interlocutors’ use of absurdity manipulates subtle overlaps of satirising play and power appeasing elisions of critique. Through this playful tension the exploitative logics embedded in Kuching's capital-centric urbanity may be productively managed by careful instrumentalisation of the ambiguities of Kuching's urban uncanny.

This afterword joins the special issue in thinking with absurdity rather than making sense of it. Across fake latrines, ghost railway jobs, suspended migrants, futile hospital care, techno roundabouts and Cuban ostriches, absurdity emerges less as a concept than a condition: trap, tactic, performance, survival. It compels engagement where bullshit thrives on indifference, showing how power governs not despite absurdity but through it. Rather than only analysing absurdity, the afterword also argues for resisting it: letting it expose the limits of governance while refusing to be captured by its logic.

This review provides an overview of significant themes that have emerged in English-speaking European anthropology in 2024. Methodologically, theoretically and thematically diverse, anthropological scholarship cannot be comprehensively captured without compromising ethnographic complexity and intellectual vibrancy. Nevertheless, this review loosely groups works under three prevailing themes. The first concerns endemic and existential doubt, the second looks at intimate relations and the third focuses on the environment and more-than-human others. Throughout 2024, significant thematic focus has pivoted on pervasive doubt and distrust, which amplifies atmospheres of confusion and intercedes in intimate relations. We find individuals struggling with racial, gender or state-based violence, orthodox and emerging patterns of power that have lasting repercussions on intimate relations and empathetic or coercive expressions of care. Against this background, individuals, institutions, families and communities are re-evaluating alliances with human and more-than-human others and establishing novel avenues for agency and critique.

Balkan, Osman. 2023. Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 235 pp. eBook: US$39.99. ISBN: 9781009288569.

Fiks, Eva. 2024. State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care, and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India. New York: Berghahn Books. 242pp. Hb.: US$135.00, ISBN: 9781805394648.

Yang, Mayfair (ed.) 2024. Anthropology of ascendant China: histories, attainments, and tribulations. New York: Routledge. 333 pp. Pb.: €37.59, ISBN: 9781032416106.

Holmes, Seth M. 2023. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with a New Preface and Epilogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 328 pp. Pb.: US$29.95/£25.00, ISBN: 9780520398634.

Van Roekel, Eva & Murphy, Fiona (eds.). 2024. A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. 323 pp. Paperback: 49.49€, ISBN: 978-3-031-55107-9.

Marchand, Trevor. 2024. The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 391 pp. Pb.: £36.00, ISBN: 978-1-80539-313-9.

Ivancheva, Mariya. 2023. The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 216 pp. Hardback: $75, ISBN: 9781503634749.

Sansi, Roger and Jonas Tinius. 2025. The Trouble with Art: An Anthropology Beyond Philistinism. New York: Routledge. 210 pp. Hb.: €128.00, ISBN: 9781032223919.

Scott-Smith, Tom. 2024. Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 229 pp. Hb. US$110.00. ISBN: 978-1-5036-3978-2.

It's been a year since this editorial team started working together. Throughout this time, debates about anticolonial struggles and the decolonization of thought have raged with new intensity. The unrestricted violence in Gaza and its unbearable destruction have eclipsed the thorny issue of restitution. Growing imperialist rivalries have become dangerously entangled with shifts towards authoritarianism and regional conflicts across the world.

This article examines the role of individual vigilance in the formation of class. Focusing on the upward social mobility of Azorean migrants, I show how being alert about one's sensed positionality orients and amplifies the generation of social class in a migratory setting. Over centuries, the Azores archipelago, situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, has been left behind by its residents in pursuit of better livelihoods elsewhere. The resulting transatlantic ties, comprising both outmigration and return migration in significant numbers, produced an economic setting that foments projects of distinction and watchful self-positioning amid conflicts between temporary returnees and permanent residents. I argue that vigilantly navigating such tense encounters can transform one's class status as well as consolidate and regulate the boundaries of social class.

The current issue features our typical collection of empirically, primarily ethnographically, based articles that paint a nuanced picture of topics of contemporary concern. Connecting these individual articles are two key themes: mobility and displacement, and temporal entanglement in the production of subjectivities. They explore how in movement (familiar and unfamiliar) pasts and (imagined and impossible) futures get entangled with structural forces such as state violence, bureaucratic hurdles, and postcolonial power dynamics. They point out how this co-constitution gives rise to relatively stable or recognisable identifications and patterning that are, nevertheless, marked by contradictions, ambiguities, and open boundaries.

This article draws on ethnographic elements collected in the heterogeneous field of African music and dance in France and French-speaking Switzerland, as well as on a previous literature on popular travelling music and dance genres between African and European cities. It participates in an ongoing conversation about the concept of the Black Mediterranean, and insists on its relevance to analyse migrations, cross-cultural formations and postcolonial conversations taking place between some European countries and their former colonies through popular music and dance productions. Ethnography and history of travelling music and dance genres leads to approach the Black Mediterranean as both a borderland of racial violence and inequalities, and a web of cultural signs, transactions, and practices that connect the African continent and European cities. This transcontinental matrix participates in reconfiguring the representations of Africanity, Blackness and Afropeanity in ambiguous and multifaceted ways.

This intimate ethnography relies on the perspective of Liza, a precarious researcher in academia who has an intimate relationship with Haruna, an asylum seeker who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. It shows how intimate partner violence and different forms of state violence, while being ontologically irreducible to each other, are deeply entangled and mutually constituted. Among the different forms of state violence, the analysis presented in this article focuses on the violence of the EU border regime, the violence of the neoliberal academia and the violence at the heart of the implicit normativities and values underlying Covid-19-related restrictions, which increased existing inequalities along several axes including class, gender and race.

In this article, I delineate how ideas of authenticity and malleability are woven into the legal and policy frameworks that regulate marriage migration in the German context. Through ethnographic interviews conducted among South Asians, I argue that personhoods along with a sense of belonging are forged through the expectation of conformity to presumed norms of the home culture as well as those of the host society. Performing a hybrid, quasi-German identity while also proving the authenticity of one's ethnic identity entails a set of practices based on the host society's expectations as well as on life goals that static definitions of diaspora, culture and norms do not allow for. Narratives of individuals in my ethnographic study who negotiate immigration and integration processes offer a rare window into continuously transforming and yet often stable identities.

This article explores how young Syrian men in Jordan perceived and practised the future in extreme material, social and rights-related precarity in the time before the fall of the Assad-regime. We introduce the notion of the ‘future as mist’ to conceptualise the future in the context of what we call stagnated crisis. Based on classic and experimental ethnographically inspired research with young Syrians in Jordan, we argue that the ways people practise the future do not always correspond with the ways they perceive the future. We discern three ways in which young Syrian men in Jordan practised futures despite simultaneously perceiving them as unattainable, namely by resorting to principles, by manoeuvring and by scrambling. Through these different ways of practising the future, young Syrian men attempted to act towards futures that were better than the present even though the paths to those futures remained shrouded in mist, that is imperceptible.

Waiting, and the ways in which time is expanded, dilated and thinned out by waiting, holds a prominent place in the literature on migration temporalities. However, in the less interventionist migration regimes of non-Western contexts, time takes on different qualities. This article examines the temporal experiences of Syrian refugees who lived in Turkey between 2011 and 2016 before arriving in Germany. In their narratives of life in Turkey, the present was not marked by emptiness or stasis but by familiarity and viscosity. The quality of familiarity arises from governmental policy choices as well as Turkey's cultural proximity to Syria. The quality of viscosity owes as much to the global organisation of capitalism as it does to Turkey's migration legislation.

There is a place on the southwest edge of Ireland, where stone and sea touch in a constant ebb and flow of memory, history and landscape. Dingle, or An Daingean as it is in the local Irish language. A name that evokes myth and magic, conjuring not only the topography of its windswept cliffs and quiet, stony fields but also the sense of something larger – a pulse, a draw, something that carries you in.

Gieser, Thorsten. 2024. Living with Wolves: Affects, Feelings, and Sentiments in Human-Wolf-Coexistence. Bielefield: Transcript Verlag. 234 pp. Pb.: €32.00, ISBN: 9783837674705.

Sarah Green, Samuli Lähteenaho, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Carl Rommel, Joseph J. Viscomi, Laia Soto Bermant and Patricia Scalco. 2024. An Anthropology of Crosslocations. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. 283 pp. Open Access. ISBN: 9789523691018.

MacQuarie, Julius-Cezar. 2023. Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 270 pp. Pb.: £39.99, ISBN: 97830319783031361883.

Deeb, Lara. 2024. Love Across Difference: Mixed Marriage in Lebanon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 316 pp. Pb.: US$32.00, ISBN: 9781503640054.

Struempell, Christian and Michael Hoffmann (eds.). 2023. Industrial Labour in an Unequal World. Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. 245 pp. Hb.: €54.95, ISBN: 9783111304267.

Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. 336 pp. Pb.: US$29.00, ISBN: 9780226833613.

Joyce, Aimée. 2024. Spectral Borders: History, Neighbourliness and Discord on the Polish-Belarusian Frontier. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 207 pp. Hb.: £65.00, ISBN: 9781912385522.

Iyam, David Uru. 2021. Shaping Tradition: Women's Roles in Ceremonial Rituals of the Agwagune. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 155 pp. Hb.: US$79.95, ISBN: 9780299334406.

Sax, William S. 2024. In the Valley of the Kauravas: A Divine Kingdom in the Western Himalaya. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: £90.00, ISBN: 9780198879350.

Berliner, David. 2024. Becoming Other: Heterogeneity and Plasticity of the Self. New York: Berghahn Books. 138 pp. Hb.: £92.00, ISBN: 9781805396482.

Miller, Daniel. 2024. The Good Enough Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. 300 pp. Hb.: £55.00, ISBN: 9781509559640.

The relationship of humans with the nonhuman world has become a central topic in anthropology in recent years. This has also led to a renewed interest in Indigenous communities, as those most vulnerable to environmental change, while also offering alternative modes of relating to the environment. But very little attention has been paid to children in such debates. Children will suffer the long-term consequences of changes. In turn, modes of relating to the environment and its human and nonhuman inhabitants are socialised during childhood. This special issue explores child socialisation in the face of environmental changes. Through ethnographic case studies from Guyana to southern Chile, our contributors discuss modes of learning across environments, the impact of moving to novel spaces, how children learn to navigate them, and the relationships they build. Our introduction gives a conceptual overview of our approach to child socialisation, the environment and change and transformation.

Wapishana people live a vibrant social world, full of human/non-human participants, and learning how to engage in these relationships with the environment is an integral part of growing up in the community. However, there are striking differences between the lives of youth today and those of their elders and ancestors. There are two major factors that contribute to this intergenerational shift: radical changes in weather patterns and residential schooling that separates youth from their kin. I compare the positive spiritual relationships youth form in their home community with ‘the sickness’, a spiritual crisis that strikes in the dormitories of boarding schools. By tracing how environment and gender impact relationships with non-human others, I explore the wider implications of social and spatial change on young lives and their imagined futures.

The Pehuenche people of southern Chile have a tradition of seasonal migration between small valleys at the foothills of the Andes, known as invernadas (winter lands), and the forests located higher up in the hills, called veranadas (summer lands), looking for pasture for their animals, firewood for the winter and piñones (Araucaria araucana seeds) for consumption and trade. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article explores the way children, through sensory experiences and storytelling, learn about trees, nature's spirits and the ways of their ancestors while developing bodily strength and skills to navigate through the forest. These experiences encourage children to develop respect for the non-human entities that inhabit the forest and a strong attachment to their territories that are fundamental to being Pehuenche.

This article discusses how Apiao children make sense of their natural and social world in an insular indigenous community, delving into the values of obedience, appreciation and independence. It explores children's strong engagement with the natural environment, the tasks required of them and the skills necessary to perform these. Learning and living in Apiao imply an intersubjective commitment to the local environment, which moulds the islanders’ identity and their idea of work. Formal schooling represents an experience of physical enclosure that contrasts starkly with the sensorial and embodied appropriation of open spaces constantly practised elsewhere. These different experiential approaches to learning-as-engaging might explain the apparent lack of ambition detected in Apiao children, together with the high number of schoolchildren assessed by state officials as having learning difficulties.

Defining themselves as a forest-dwelling people, the Xikrin (Mebengokré) of Northern Brazil have lived by the Bacajá river for over half a century. The river environment has enabled younger generations to master numerous new skills and develop new relationships to their environment through everyday activities like playing, swimming, fishing, eating, washing and bathing together. However, these activities and bonds are now at risk once again due to the Belo Monte Dam, which threatens to drain the river. Drawing on decades of ethnographic research, this article discusses transformations in Xikrin children's relations with the river and its inhabitants, human and non-human. Analysing children's everyday activities, their acquisition of different skills in their new environment informed by an openness to knowledge of others, as well as political debates concerning the threats the dam poses to children's welfare, I emphasise the central role of children in enacting and adapting Xikrin relations to their social, material and political environments.

The articles of the special issue bring together studies of children and socio-environmental change in lowland South America, charting a new and timely field of research. I trace the history of studies of children and the environment in the region and the place of these themes in different theoretical traditions. I conclude by considering some of the effects of this pioneering approach on anthropological theories developed for the region, some of which have had a significant impact on the discipline more widely.

One Saturday morning in late November 2024, a young man entered a residential area near the University of Oslo, carrying a letter and a package, searching for the home of the prolific Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Earlier, this man, Giulio, a master's student from Sicily, had visited me in my university office seeking advice. He had recently returned from Fiji, where he had studied the impact of rising sea levels forcing people to leave their homes. Giulio had conducted fieldwork for over a year, twice as long as master's students at Oslo University are usually allowed. But his supervisor, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, had supported him wholeheartedly.

Ghosh, Sahana. 2023. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderlands. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9780520395732.

Bell, Kirsten. 2022. Silent but Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviour. London: Caw Press. 288 pp. Pb.: £11.99, ISBN: 978-1-3999-3632-3.

Morris, Julia Caroline. 2023. Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 308 pp. Hb.: US$67.95, ISBN: 9781501765865.

Liebelt, Claudia. 2023. Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey. New York: Syracuse University Press. 344 pp. Hb.: US$80.00, ISBN: 9780815637905.

Schuster, Caroline E., illustrated by E. Bernardou and D. Bueno. 2023. Forecasts: A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 232 pp. Pb.: US$28.95, ISBN: 9781487542238.

Kwon, June Hee. 2023. Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 241 pp. Pb.: US$26.95, ISBN: 9781478025337.

Bandak, Andreas and Daniel M. Knight (eds.). 2024. Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 344 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 978-1-4780-3028-7.

Zeitlyn, David. 2022. An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts. Oxford: Berghahn. 155 pp. Pb.: £9.99, ISBN: 978-1-80073-535-4.

Vevaina, Leilah. 2023. Trust Matters: Parsi Endowments in Mumbai and the Horoscope of a City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 224 pp. Pb.: US$26.95, ISBN-13: 978-1478025399.

Weiss, Margot (ed.). 2024. Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 344 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9781478030386.

Shrestha, Tina. 2023. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 242 pp. Pb.: US$30.00, ISBN: 9780295751528.

McKinley, Alexander. 2024. Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka. New York: Columbia University Press. 344 pp. Pb.: US$35.00, ISBN: 9780231210614.

Thiemann, André. 2024. The Politics of Relations: How Self-Government, Infrastructures, and Care Transform the State in Serbia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 302 pp. Hb.: £99.00. ISBN: 978-1-80539-551-5.

Bond, David. 2022. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 262 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9780520386785.

Kato, Etsuko. 2024. Mobile Japanese Migrants to the Pacific West and East: Self-searching, Work, and Identification. New York: Routledge. 194 pp. Hb.: US$169.77, ISBN: 9781032539645.

This special issue examines the concept of ‘technomoral governance’, a framework that describes the intertwining of moral imperatives with technocratic and technological solutions in contemporary political governance. Building on Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma's (2016) notion of ‘technomoral politics’, which looked at how moral projects become intertwined with legal-technical interventions, we explore how political tactics increasingly rely on technical and technologically driven innovations to address fundamental societal challenges. Confronted with issues that range from climate change to rampant urban inequalities and humanitarian crises, actors across China, India, Ghana, Denmark, the UK and Mexico come to invoke the language of technomoral interventions to justify political decision-making. These approaches, executed under the guise of neutrality, mask existing inequalities while also offering opportunities for unexpected forms of resistance. We argue that the convergence of moral and technological strategies represents a significant development in contemporary governance, producing murky, contradictory and often highly unequal effects.

Two intertwined trends have hit cities all over the world: an increasing drive towards experimentation with citizens as participants that is turning cities into ‘living labs’ or ‘test-beds’, and the use of streams of digital data from people and devices for the algorithmic management of urban life following the ‘smart city’ model. In the visions of smart city designers and developers of data systems, public participation is configured as a matter of motivation and trust and how citizens can be persuaded to contribute their data through processes such as gamification. In this context, technomoral politics become a matter of engaging citizens in allegedly neutral data systems that are supposed to govern social and political processes. Yet, based on ethnographic work with citizens and officials who manage everyday life with floodings in Vejle, Denmark, this article demonstrates that the visions for technomoral participation tied to a smart city project can be challenged by alternative ways of participating through everyday acts of mutual investment and care, including also alternative uses of and experimentation with data.

In response to a perceived ‘moral crisis’ amid global capitalism, China's communist party currently aims to instil morality, credibility and trust among citizens. This article examines an instance of technomoral governance that fosters citizen self-regulation in pursuit of the neosocialist agenda of green development: a digital platform called Ant Forest that steers consumers towards ‘ecological consciousness’. The app mobilises techniques of quantification, especially through green credits and carbon metrics, to recalibrate accountability away from corporations and the state and towards individual behaviour. It also attempts to facilitate sustainable choices by offering a simple interface for monitoring green behaviour that reduces complexity, both for onscreen choices and offline activities. The app thereby paves the way to ‘automating morality’, in the sense of replacing the physical work and moral effort involved in attaining a desired ‘green’ subjectivity. Ethnographic insights, ranging from rural afforestation workers to urban app users seeking sustainable futures, underscore the tensions and contradictions between embracing digital tools for diverse moral ends. Exploring China's digital administration system, designed to be predictive and conflict-averse, sheds light on the technomoral dimensions underlying this approach to environmental restitution. Beyond neoliberalism, this convergence of governance, technology and society's self-regulation contributes to global discourse on environmental policy and digital social management, presenting a distinct neosocialist approach to technomoral governance.

This article interrogates the relationship between crop insurance logic and rural politics surrounding agricultural misfortune in Maharashtra, India. Indian agriculture is widely considered to be in crisis. In response, the Indian government introduced an insurance scheme that promises to alleviate the crisis through technocratic means using sophisticated calculative practices. While critical literature underlines the depoliticising effects this supposedly ‘objective’ calculation has on rural misfortune, I demonstrate how quantified understandings have moralised and politicised rural issues in new technocratic idioms. I follow an organisation that adopted the language of numbers to formulate a critique of insurance logic. By repeating that they ‘just want to know how the insurance amount was calculated’, this organisation mobilised the axiomatic virtues of quantification to hold the insurance company to account.

‘Leave No One Behind’ is an integral value-laden part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and offers an exemplary case of the increasing fusion of technical and moral imperatives in development. This article examines how donor-determined inclusion indicators shaped how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Ghana adopted the moral value of Leave No One Behind. Drawing on ethnographic research with NGOs working to include people with disabilities, this article demonstrates the limits of technical mechanisms of inclusion that are legible in donor audits. Yet, beyond the bounds of technomoral assessments in upwards accountability to donors, NGO staff generated horizontal collaborations with peers in disability advocacy organisations that strengthened their inclusion practices, offering insights on the potential of relational forms of accountability.

Urban mobility in Mexico City is managed through a technomoral form of governance in which activists, advocates, experts and other stakeholders agree on priorities to shape government policies and projects. The process is less of a political-ideological haggling, and more of a moral struggle between right and wrong. These moral views are supported through technically implementable data or formulas. The phrase ‘what is not counted doesn't count’ was frequently used by a local government official in charge of cycling promotion, to call on activists to measure the use of bicycles in order to demand improvements in infrastructure and projects. To advance in their objectives, stakeholders reached moral agreements over bundles of information that served as building blocks for policies and projects.

For Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma writing about contemporary India, ‘technomoral politics’ refer to the way individuals and organisations translate moral projects into technical and implementable policies or laws, or justify technocratic acts as ‘moral imperatives’. In Britain, by contrast, technomoral governance takes different forms. Rather than the (hyper-)moralisation of political programmes, policies and laws are typically advanced through less emotive, more bureaucratic language of management and administration, and seemingly neutral discourses of economics, efficiency, ‘common sense’, ‘value for money’ and ‘responsibility to taxpayers’. This article examines these processes in the context of the UK. Drawing on case studies of three post-2010 Conservative government flagship policy initiatives (austerity, social impact bonds and student loans), I explore how these programmes were advanced and the rationalities that underpinned them. These initiatives, I conclude, herald a new phase in the development of technomoral governance, one based on technomoral logics of financialisation and the private capture of public assets.

Drawing inspiration from the workings of a literature review, this annual review article rounds up publications from major European anthropology journals in a way that allows readers to jot down, carve up and route themselves towards articles and special issues that might be of interest to them. Arranged under three large thematic subsections, the annual review article looks at articles that broadly fell under the research disciplines of environmental anthropology, anthropology of labour and the anthropology of religion, before presenting a condensed review of the notable special issues from 2023. It is laced with a few observations and reflections, spaced intermittently throughout, and ends with a brief conclusion that touches on the joys of reading anthropology – a sensation still experienced by many, but one that may be less available to those who are caught in the jostles of building an academic career.

Benson, Peter. 2023. Stuck Moving Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 380 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9780520388741.

McDowell, Andrew. 2024. Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$28.00, ISBN: 9781503638778.

McElroy, Erin. 2024. Silicon Valley Imperialism. Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$27.95. ISBN: 9781478030218.

Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J. 2024. American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.00, ISBN: 9781517916244.

Strümpell, Christian. 2023. Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in East- ern India. New Delhi: Social Science Press. 390 pp. Hb.: IN₹1375, ISBN: 9789383166572.

Tooley, Christa Ballard. 2023. Tenement Nation: Working-class Cosmopolitanism in Edinburgh. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 261 pp. Hb.: US$75.00, ISBN: 9780253065995.

Kusserow, Adrie. 2024. The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poetry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 176 pp. Pb.: US$19.95. ISBN: 9781478025573.

This issue hosts a special section on “Projects and Project Temporalities: Ethnographic Reflections on the Normative Power of the Project Form”. As Graan and Rommel underline in their introduction, projects grew historically as fundamental ways of organizing social life. The guest editors invite us to take a close ethnographic look at the projectification of time in neoliberal and (post)colonial contexts. The collection of papers attends to the logics of the project in diverse ethnographic contexts and temporal frameworks by offering historically informed ethnographies of what progress, failure and success mean to various people. Authors further attend to imaginaries of temporality and futurity, and technologies of time and control. Although Graan and Rommel pay attention to aspects that connect diverse types of projects, they also carefully present their linguistic and ethnographic specificities and unique temporal configurations, including the projects’ afterlives, contributing to anthropological discussions on time.

The project form – a goal-driven approach to resource allocation and task coordination – is one of the most widespread organisational technologies in the world today. Significantly, projects are pervasive organisers of time. They tether activity to schedules. They entail social synchronisations and disruptions. They presuppose particular temporal imaginaries – for example, time as partible and progressive – that mediate action. This introduction examines how the temporalities of the project form organise, animate, complicate and condition social dynamics. In surveying the contributions to this special issue, we highlight how the project form's figuration of time grounds three modalities of normative power: projects as a model of purposive human agency; projects as a form of temporal containment; and projects as an ideal of action and futurity that linger long after their ostensible completion.

It is said that for each year of armed conflict, a decade is needed to clean up the explosive remnants of war. What does it mean to imagine a project of such duration? In landmine removal, what is theoretically temporary work can start to look permanent. Tracking the efforts of a prominent humanitarian de-mining organisation, the British–American HALO Trust, in then-government-controlled eastern Ukraine, I show how clearance both follows project logic as well as upends two key assumptions of the project form: that projects have ends and that they have results. I demonstrate ethnographically how Ukrainians working for HALO approached de-mining as a project of unclear duration, finding both horror and promise in the protracted timeline. Nevertheless, I conclude that the idea of a project without end is a fallacy because the supportive structures that enable the project may evaporate at any moment.

In recent years Indian construction firms have come under increasing pressure to present their building projects as ‘time-bound’. In industry discourse, time-bound projects smoothly and sequentially hit project deadlines. While such an ideal is never realised in practice, I argue that the temporal politics of ‘time-bound’ projects lies not in their enactment of a smooth and progressive time but rather in the work of orchestration that binds together the heterogeneous temporalities of kinship, debt and migration that support work on the site. I demonstrate how these heterogeneous temporalities are erased in the image of the time-bound project, even as they support the project. Focusing on the implementation of the project-form itself elucidates the orchestration and contestation of diverse temporalities at stake in infrastructural development.

This article examines a British migration project – which sent select children to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 – in order to analyse dissonant temporalities in projects of social engineering. The article focuses on three of the several complex and at times incompatible temporalities animated and juxtaposed by the project. First, it discusses ‘imperial infinity’ as the political temporality that framed the project. As ‘imperial investments’, the children were a means to securing colonial continuity well beyond project time. Second, it considers how temporal logics of social projects presuppose a rupture with the past, foregrounding their rationale of futurity. Finally, the article examines the sense of time of the migrant child placed in an institution, highlighting its clockwork discipline and spatiotemporal standstill. Through this case, the article reflects on antagonistic temporalities within social projects, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.

This article examines imaginaries of the social agency of the project form in contemporary Egypt. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who contrive small-scale investment projects, it demonstrates how projects are envisioned to (1) create the world anew, (2) shape the ‘near future’ and (3) fashion platforms of relative stability amid unpredictability, hustling and making do. The article also illustrates how the project form's normative temporalities are often distorted, materialising in iterative sequences of never fully completed projects that nonetheless ‘make the world move’. In conclusion, I suggest that the same iterative temporality is recognisable in the Egyptian regime's current push for spectacular megaprojects, and that an imaginary of social and temporal agency undergirds the attraction to Egyptian projects across scales.

This article investigates kinship responsibilities in a Palestine ravaged by war and conflict. It is centred around Françoise Héritier's observation that having a ‘fixed’ position in a set of possible siblings is an unchangeable condition of life. That is, no known kinship system allows an ego to move temporally from the birth order. I explore how perpetual conflict interferes with responsibilities that come with being born in a fixed kinship order. How does biopolitics interrupt or undo generational roles? What happens to the subject of biopolitical instability who is unable to fulfil kinship obligations? I explore these questions through cases of Palestinian Romani families from Gaza who since 2007 have been migrating to the West Bank – migrations that sometimes cause relatives to disappear and later reappear, effectively remaking kinship responsibilities. A ‘minor’ register of perpetual war and conflict that is often neglected in favour of narratives of trauma.

Although anthropology has predominantly portrayed the phenomenon of precarity as a negative consequence of neoliberalism, it has long been romanticised as a constitutive element of the lives of cultural producers. This article explores the intersection of these two forms of precarity – the disruptive and the idealised – through an examination of Israel's young generation of filmmakers and their navigation of the country's increasingly neoliberal economic climate. The article particularly interrogates a common ‘housing solution’ adopted by many young filmmakers to continue their artistic pursuits, which involves living in low-rent buildings undergoing extensive renovation. I show how the filmmakers experience precarity as both a source of disruption and a generative force for their art, thus challenging the prevailing theoretical framework that views precarity as a predominantly disruptive state.

Grotti, Vanessa. 2022. Nurturing the Other. First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia. New York: Berghahn. 197 pp. Hb.: US$135.00. ISBN: 978-1-80073-458-6.

McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2020. Words Matter: Meaning and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: £64.00. ISBN: 9781108427210.

Sokolíčková, Zdenka. 2023. The Paradox of Svalbard Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic. London: Pluto Press. 202 pp. Pb.: £24.99. ISBN: 9780745347400.

Sausdal, David. 2023. Globalizing Local Policing. An Ethnography of Change and Concern among Danish Detectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 254 pp. Hb.: £39.99. ISBN: 978-3-031-18918-0.

A growing concern about academic freedoms has recently resulted in the EASA General Assembly's December 2023 vote on a Motion to Create a Working Group on Human Rights and Academic Freedom, followed in February 2024 by the EASA executive's letter expressing direct concern after Professor Ghassan Hage's working relationship with the Max Planck Institute was terminated after misplaced accusations of racism and antisemitism. It is timely that the current issue opens up a space to discuss ethics, commitment, critique, authorship and truth seeking.

How do people discern between truth and untruth? What characterises their engagements with evidence? Some progress in answering these huge questions can be made by exploring them in conditions of radical epistemic uncertainty, such as the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus's behaviour was largely unknown and the efficacy of interventions unknowable. This article focuses on the workings of suspicion and its relationship with evidence, doing so by analysing conversations collected in a Facebook discussion group devoted to ‘Covid truth’. It argues that suspicion produces its own forms of falsification but has a contentious relationship with positive truth. By outlining the epistemic labour of self-avowed truth seekers, the article elucidates some of the mechanisms by which Covid conspiracy theories proliferated and explains why its partakers were convinced that they had a critical edge over the rest of us.

Despite repeated calls for change, social and cultural anthropology is still dominated by single-authored works. I consider two thought experiments that might disturb the status quo in interesting ways. Anthropologists could publish anonymously, treating ourselves in the same way as we treat our anonymised informants, for example, using pseudonyms. Alternatively, we could treat our colleagues in the field not only as equals but also as co-authors. Both these options have implications concerning the ‘dividual’ author (perhaps now thought of as an ‘auth’), and involve rethinking the ‘hau’ of publication.

I argue that the standard model of research ethics pushes the ethnographer of bureaucracies to the cautious, concise and compliant textual practices styles of the bureaucracy itself. Given the methodological importance of writing to ethnography, this matters. To make the argument, I draw on my experience of my decision to embargo my PhD thesis, an ethnography of an international donor agency. I show how the key gatekeeper to my research sought to translate concepts from research ethics (consent, avoidance of harm) into insisting on writing and stylistic practices familiar to his organisation (scope of work, risk), in order to constrain future academic publications. These dilemmas played out in the text of the thesis, its styles, forms and arguments. In studying up, the ethical demands of writing present challenges to the text and its methodological significance. I suggest that navigating these methodological challenges demand strategies that also start with the text.

State securitisation and internment programmes in Xinjiang have, since 2017, rapidly changed living conditions for its inhabitants and created new degrees of risk. Here, I consider whether the consent given by participants for my use of interview transcripts and other research materials is meaningful when it is no longer safe to contact participants, and their consent was given under very different circumstances. I argue that at such critical moments neither formal codes of ethics nor the ‘situated’ ethics of fieldwork offer helpful guidance, but that consideration of the internal good of anthropology, and insights offered by its practice, can provide potential answers.

Care, in lowland South America, is an ethical practice that is constitutive of kinship relations. Drawing on the case of the Warao, an indigenous people of Venezuela, I complicate this link between care and kinship in two interrelated ways: first, by focusing on the impossibility of perfect care (the particularising orientation of care makes neglect inevitable); and second, by acknowledging that kinship must not only be made, but also unmade. Both strands of this argument contribute to an effort to show that the dark side of the care/kinship nexus is relationally productive. Since kinship relations are constituted by the memory of past acts of care and nurture, quarrels that arise from reciprocal accusations of laziness and stinginess trigger dynamics of separation with long-term implications. Care is remembered but its limits are also acknowledged, especially at death, and such reflexivity contributes to its properly ethical character.

In this article I contribute to posthuman anthropology by developing two lines of thought. I first suggest that the post-Cartesian ontology integral to posthumanism accommodates a new scientifically informed version of negative theology. I then explore how this new negative theology implies a posthuman religion. By analysing Michel Serres's reconceptualisation of religion as the opposite of negligence and engaging with efforts to build on this thought by Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour, I develop a theory of posthuman religion I call religence. With the innovation of this term, I bring posthuman religion into view and, to show how religence may be approached anthropologically, I draw on Anna Tsing's ‘critical description’ of the interdependence between Tricholoma fungi and pine trees. Religence, I conclude, is best understood not as a single pervasive and unchanging mode of relating that can eliminate negligence, but as a plurality of provisional and shifting religence–negligence complexes.

Ghosh, Sahana. 2023. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderland. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-9573-2.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud and Shahram Khosravi (eds.) 2022. Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below. London: Pluto Press. 216 pp. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN: 978-0-7453- 4161-3.

Shih, Elena. 2023. Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 288 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-7970-1.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2021. Subversive Archaism. Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 239 pp. Ppb.: $25.95. ISBN: 9781478017622.

Walter, Anna-Maria. 2021. Intimate Connections: Love and Marriage in Pakistan's High Mountains. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 244 pp. Pb.: US$37.95, ISBN: 9781978820487.

Segalen, Martine. 2022. Destins Français. Essai d'auto-ethnographie familiale. Paris: CREAPHIS Editions. 314 pp. Pb.: €12.00, ISBN: 9782354281823.

Lazarev, Egor. 2023. State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 321 pp. Hb.: £75.00, ISBN: 9781009245951.

Campbell, Stephen. 2022. Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 210 pp. Hb.: US$51.95, ISBN: 9781501764882.

‘Winter is coming!’ The ominous phrase punctuating George R.R. Martin’s popular fantasy saga plays as a repetitive warning that there is something out there threatening the world as it is, something the political powers of the time are oblivious to, made shortsighted as they are by their petty quarrels and thirst for power. As much as the warning resounds with contemporaneous anxieties, the underlying message remains anthropo-centred and anchored in warfare concerns – dead people from old wars are coming back lest we constantly keep them at bay. It is tempting to reverse the claim into ‘summer is coming’ to make the point about the actual threat which needs to be addressed by the same shortsighted political powers. It has become common sense that human-induced climate change is a new actor in/of history. Indeed, history has been epistemologically redefined after the popularisation of the Anthropocene in the 1990s to develop into ‘big histories’ that feed global imaginaries about numerous new agentivities (earth, life, nature and also water and ice). History will never be the same, nor the figure of the human. The wintery summer that is upon us warrants our attention. Anthropology has a lot to offer, we believe, precisely by thinking laterally and including agents, forces and materialities that we simply can’t afford to ignore.

The Anthropocene epoch is one where human mastery has left an indelible mark on our planet's geological record. A grand narrative that foregrounds human domination over nature, the Anthropocene should, however, not foreclose agentive capacity beyond the human. This special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores engagements with ice, an iconic non-human element of the Anthropocene. The articles demonstrate how recognising ice's vitality and impact on humans challenges dominant epistemologies, transcends the life/death binary, confuses the boundaries of matter, and alters timescales, unsettling popular imaginaries about the climate. Specific in how its vitality is expressed, ice is also here universal as a substance enmeshed in earthly processes that transcend localities. Altogether, these accounts evoke a sense of humility in response to the vitality of ice, urging us to embrace the agency of the non-human, the lack of appreciation for which is indeed inherent to the very conditions of the Anthropocene.

With technological developments, distant Himalayan ice has largely replaced early scientific accounts that emerged from physical engagement. Ice became an abstraction that in contemporary accounts is commonly enmeshed in a climate change imaginary and aims to contribute to knowledge about something happening at the planetary level. This article proposes a shift in narrative scale, drawing on ethnographic research in the Indian Himalayas. It explores stories of entanglement in icy ecologies, portraying ice not as a mere abstraction but as a vital body. In these accounts, ice is at the centre of mundane and intimate encounters with climate change and its materiality induces a relationship between bodies (humans, non-humans) that transcends their ontological boundaries. Recognizing these experiences is a fundamental element in reimagining Himalayan ice, departing from technological limitations, and underscoring the consequences of ice melting within the context of climate change.

Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet.

This article engages with the natural phenomena of meteorite concentrations in Antarctica to explore how ice, particularly flowing, viscous ice, can offer alternative conceptions of change over non-human time. Drawing from historical research at the Smithsonian Institute as well as ethnographic experience in the High Arctic, I foreground glaciological understandings of ice as a monomineralic rock, one that indicates geologic time (rather than climatological crisis). In highlighting the rocky relationality between ice and meteorites, this article focuses on moments of capricious interruption into uniformitarian time: material instances where the geo-logics that underpin scientific conceptions of the non-human past were ‘glitched’. This article argues that the glitches the viscous ice makes visible can help reframe human and non-human time, and Geo-Anthropos relations; a crucial step to better understanding the momentum and meaning of the ‘Anthrop’/‘Capital-ocene’.

Changing sea ice due to anthropogenic climate change demands scientists to revisit their taken-for-granted concepts of sea ice. The ‘rotten ice project’ was one such effort by scientists at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center, which sought to develop novel methods to characterise sea ice as a physical-biological-chemical unit. Rotten ice, however, evaded scientists’ efforts to capture it. Using these ‘escapes’ from scientists’ preconceptions during my fieldwork with the team from 2014 to 2016, I draw on interpretations of Georges Canguilhem's understanding of the relationship between life and knowledge to make sense of what rotten ice demanded. Following Canguilhem's suggestions, I argue that vitalism as an ethos treats concepts as tools for scientists to relate to their environment, challenging them to to remain receptive to the difference that error, experimentation and encounters made to their concepts—and thereby stay open to more-than-human worlds like those found in sea ice.

Worry for the fate of Himalayan glaciers is prominent in climate change research, and encounters with glacial retreat shape imaginings of future ruination. Emotions run high when social scientists concerned with the implications of ice sheet collapse are confronted with the views of select glaciologists who downplay the scope of ice melt. At play in the disciplinary disagreements that arise are different orientations to time, and different imaginaries of Himalayan climate futures based on images of, and data about, glacial retreat. It is the complexity of glaciological knowledge production that this article creates space to understand. At stake is an effort to hold up, for social science audiences, the disparate knowings – between and among disciplines – that impact how Himalayan glacial melt is discussed and imagined.

Goldman, Mara J. 2020. Narrating Nature. Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 304 pp. Ebook: US$60.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4194-2.

Winchell, Mareike. 2022. After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 352 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9780520386440.

Barua, Maan. 2023. Lively Cities. Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. 382 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1256-7.

Stafford, Charles. 2020. Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 196 pp. Pb. £22.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-71655-0.

Świtek, Beata. 2021. Reluctant Intimacies: Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands. New York: Berghahn. 242 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. ISBN: 978-1-80073-016-8.

Bubandt, Nils, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and Rachel Cypher (eds.). 2022. Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene. Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds. 432 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1165-2.

Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 224 pp. Pb.: US$32.00. ISBN: 978-0-295-74961-7.

Adams, Vincanne. 2023. Glyphosate & the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 184 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1675-5.

Kravel-Tovi, Michal. 2017. When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780231183246.

As this volume goes to the press, volatility is again writ large in public debate. We look back on what seems to be the hottest summer on record, and global warming has entered everyday decision making in an unprecedented manner. While ongoing armed conflicts and recent election outcomes across Europe indicate profound shifts not only in geopolitical scenarios, but also, perhaps, in the means and ends of politics. We cannot help but sense an urgency to respond while not (yet) knowing what it is we need to respond to and how.

This article proposes volatility as a term with which to approach some of the challenges that shape the current world. We develop this term as an analytical concept and perspective by thinking with people and ecologies from the margins, where uncertainty and rapid transformations have long been the order of the day. An approach focusing on volatility as a social and ecological condition provides an opportunity to consider what life in a radically uncertain world means and does to its inhabitants, which may offer useful lessons to those of us who are currently being forced to let go of their illusionary certainties. The article introduces a special issue elaborating volatility as a concept and perspective in various contexts and from different angles.

Before European colonisation, the Brisbane River supported several indigenous language groups who, working with its natural variations in flow, were able to sustain stable hunter-gatherer lifeways for many millennia. In contrast, colonial settlers made strenuous efforts to control one of Australia's largest and most unpredictable rivers, driven by aims to achieve social and material stability in what they saw as a hostile and adversarial environment. Part of the perceived threat was – and still is – the river's ‘volatility’ and its tendency, from time to time, to send great surges of floodwater downstream. Brisbane's contemporary inhabitants have had to consider how to engage with the non-human environment in ways that move beyond hard-line visions of command and control and embrace more convivial ideas about working with the river.

Sometimes attempts to reduce volatility have the opposite effect. A naturally flexible system which is regimented and disciplined to a fixed shape loses its ability to adjust to shifting circumstances. This is a recurrent theme in the anthropology of globalisation, where the dynamics between the fixed and the fluid are no less important than the more commonplace local–global contrast. Modernity produces infrastructures, institutions and practices that are unable to adapt smoothly to changing ecological conditions, giving priority to standardised models rather than solutions tailored to fit assemblages with unique characteristics. This article discusses two cases from Norway – a controversy over a bridge in an ecologically vulnerable area and a mudslide leading to considerable material damage and the loss of ten lives – as a means of looking into the scalar gaps and the relationship between stability and volatility in a society committed to technological control.

Pastoralists must continuously confront uncertainties, responding to high levels of variability and volatility where the future is unknown. Yet mainstream modernising development in pastoral areas aims to create stability through control, enacted through restrictive plans and policies. Through a series of case studies, this article explores pastoralists’ own sensitive, flexible and caring responses, attuned to the instabilities of pastoral settings. The cases show how uncertainties can be seen as intersecting constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice, where flexible, often collective, caring approaches are central to pastoralists’ lives. These insights have wider implications for other contexts where people inhabit uncertain worlds, and so suggest a fundamental challenge to the controlling approaches of conventional development.

Structural inequality is typically analysed as a human issue. In contrast, this article explores how multispecies approaches can illuminate how structural inequality is (re)produced through more-than-human landscapes. It focuses on Jakarta, Indonesia, where anthropogenic subsidence is pulling the coastline into the sea. Coastal kampung settlements, already marginalised, face increased flooding and displacement by seawall infrastructures. By combining colonial histories of delta infrastructures with ethnographic attention to kampung Maura Turun and the Asian green mussels that its residents cultivate, the article examines how subsidence is produced and how inequalities are made through landscapes of water and waste. Mussels are engaged as a tracing device, an entry point into the overlapping, situated crises entangled with subsidence that kampung dwellers experience. Overall, the article proposes that paying attention to more-than-human relations, in this case with mussels, can illuminate an ecological dimension of structural inequality.

The articles in this special issue of Social Anthropology reposition volatility as a critical concern for anthropological enquiry. At a time of global uncertainty – marked by environmental, economic, geopolitical and humanitarian crises – it seems that everyday life is more volatile than ever. But what does describing it so actually mean? Volatility is commonly understood to be a characteristic of, or a tendency for, things to change quickly and abruptly. It is often a way to describe a person's behaviour or even their character – to account for someone's rapid and perhaps surprising switch to anger and rage, for example. Some may, though, more usually think of volatility as an explanatory term that economists, business strategists and risk managers employ to describe, understand and forecast fluctuations in financial markets, trading and commodity price shocks, or when analysing the boom-and-bust nature of oil production and energy-dependent economies (e.g. Andersen and Bollerslev 2018; Campello and Zucco 2021; Sinclair 2013). Sociologists and political scientists also think of volatility as a useful hermeneutic for analysing the fragility and precarity of societies and political systems, as the editors and contributors of a recent book do when considering the future of democracies in Asia (Hsiao and Yang 2022). Ecologists talk of volatile ecosystems (e.g. Exton et al 2014), the nature of which become more urgent to understand in a rapidly changing world, and although the idea of abrupt change in climate systems and ecosystems is not new, the vast and ever-growing body of scientific literature about it now drips with references to thresholds and tipping points, to uncertainty, unpredictability, and to the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. Lenton 2013; Bonan and Doney 2018; Steffen et al 2018).

Kinship studies are certainly a hallmark for anthropology as a discipline. Yet, it has been more than a decade since Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale has published a paper on kinship (except for a review article by Giovanna Bacchiddu [2015] on two books about international adoption and the reconfiguration of the American family model). We have to go back as far as the late 2000’s to read one, when Warren Shapiro wrote a peremptory critique of Susan McKinnon's book in which the latter had strongly argued against “neo-Darwinian biological assumptions” underpinning the kinship theories developed by evolutionary psychology. The long absence of kinship from issues of this journal elicits an obvious comment: it was about time Social Anthropology / Anthropology Sociale devotes a full issue to this topic and engages with recent ethnographic theory on kinship and kinship matters. While we don't believe that it is our role as new editorial team to ponder the reasons for the omission of this topic, let us simply notice the major turn in kinship studies as a beginning for explanation. At the turn of the century, kinship as a topic has evolved from theoretical discussions about “systems” and social organization to a urge for describing and understanding new patterns of relatedness, transnational families, parenting, and adopting. Entire journals were created out of the need to explore ignored and emerging universes of relatedness and reimagine family studies. Despite the seismic shift from concerns about terminologies, ways and varieties of affiliation, and primary forms of structuring human lives to questions of care, parenting, and having kin, kinship studies have not been the hotspot of anthropological debate for years. However, they have consistently been addressed by books reviewed for this journal.

‘Kinning and De-kinning’ introduces a special issue that considers how houses, heirlooms and other owned items reproduce kinship and family in diverse societies. It revisits death and inheritance in kinship studies, with a focus on processes of ‘passing on’ and the materiality of things as well as bodies. Incorporating temporalities and materialities in the changing expression of deeply felt emotions that extend between people and between people and things, we echo classic concerns in kinship studies around the incorporation of strangers via affinity, while mobilising the notion of house societies, bringing classic anthropological insight on intergenerational transfer of wealth to bear on questions of identity and belonging. Showing how processes of kinning are always selective and negotiated, the articles in this special issue argue that they also carry with them the potential for kinning's shadow: just as property can enable kin relations to be re/produced, they can also be used to release people from kinship through what we term ‘de-kinning’: instances of failed appropriation and disrupted kin relations. The article outlines an approach to kinship that takes seriously the enduring qualities of material and property, while maintaining the argument that kinship is achieved (or negated) through the active performance of acknowledged relations.

Divorce, remarriage and new partnerships create blended families with complex configurations of emotional and financial engagements. The latest reform of the Danish Inheritance Act in 2008 was an attempt to cope with the legal challenges posed by blended families with regard to inheritance. The solution was to grant the surviving spouse greater rights as well as a greater share of the estate, thus favouring the horizontal conjugal bond between current spouses. Since the surviving spouse is often not the parent of all the deceased's children, the vertical transfer of assets and heirlooms between generations is challenged. This has consequences for the way material things can generate continuities and act to reproduce kinship over time, as a way of kinning former and coming generations. This article addresses the role of inheritance and heirlooms in processes of kinning and de-kinning.

In this article we explore the inheritance of hytte, or secondary homes, in Norway. Inspired by the notion of ‘kinning’, we extend the notion of kinning to include various materialities and temporalities. In particular, we trace the passing on of the hytte ethnographically as a stretched moment, and argue that temporality adds another layer to the understanding of the hytte as a participant in kinning. Our material indicates a number of connections between the hytte as a property to be passed on and the family/kin as a reproducing unit, connections that unfold over time, decades, a lifetime or more. Through this approach, it is possible to trace processes of kinning, but also what we call ‘de-kinning’, involving detachment, refusals and rejection. The article shows that a focus on materials and built structures adds to the understanding of kinship in contemporary societies.

This article examines the narratives and practices of return experienced by long-term Nairobi-based Luo seeking to make a home in rural western Kenya. Building a rural home, and being buried there, remain crucial to many urban Luo understandings of a successful life. This is a project full of contingency: it relies on resources gained in the city, as well as access to land and the cultivation of rural kin relations. Although ‘home’ and ‘return’ were often spoken of in idealised terms, desires to return were as much focused on living towards the future as on a nostalgic sense of a lost past. Practices of building a rural home grapple with expectations of rural and urban kin, the challenges of doing things properly, and responsibilities of caring for home and landscapes in a way that can ensure future generations’ capacity to dwell on the same land. This desire to belong to the future is at the heart of Nairobi Luo dreams of ‘return’.

This article explores the relationship between property, law and everyday life in two self-managed collective housing sites in England, a housing co-operative and a co-housing development. In each of these sites the residents are bound together by a property law framework, by their built environment and by the spaces they share and manage. The residents are developing alternative legalities, their own informal norms and non-legally enforceable rules, which are transmitted to new residents in a form of inheritance. This article offers a new perspective on sharing property and belonging to a collective, within a housing culture based on individual ownership. The argument that the concepts of kinning and inheritance can be ‘stretched’ to take account of the intangible ‘properties’ generated by intentional communities’ residents, contributes to both socio-legal studies and legal anthropology.

Focusing on the collective memories and life stories of local people regarding their courtyard house siheyuan in the old town of Beijing, this article examines how the dramatically shifting state discourses influence inheritance practices and perceptions of kinship over time in modern China. Narratives of the siheyuan constructed by the elderly residents feature extended family vis-à-vis a ‘Confucian state’, favouring male heirs during pre-revolutionary times. Siheyuan were nationalised during the following period of high socialism, when men and women were granted equal rights in property. After being returned to their former owners in the post-Mao reform era, the dilapidated siheyuan were confronted by neoliberal privatisation and commercialisation. Despite the physical survival of the siheyuan, it is now common for siheyuan siblings to turn against each other, as people struggle over shares of their suddenly valuable but neglected ancestral home. Departing from Freedman's lineage theories and Lévi-Strauss's house society, this article explores house and relatedness in the sense of ‘de-kinning’ as part of China's modernising process. While drawing attention to the subtle continuities and the emergence of new forms of relatedness, it also suggests that the siheyuan dwellers have demonstrated high degrees of resilience and adaptability when coping with the vicissitudes of life.

In the atoll society of Tokelau, intergenerational succession has occurred since approximately 1925 without a concomitant exchange of enduring material objects, with the exception of land. The article explores how a significant increase in material wealth, including more permanent housing, and the ultimate threat represented by climate change, that of losing the land altogether, affects the intergenerational transfer of goods and relationship patterns. The case of Tokelau illustrates how kinning and de-kinning operate in a society where the passing on of property is neither associated with death (inheritance) nor with private property, but with the ongoing transmission of collective belonging and selected, inalienable things.

Nucho, Joanne R. 2016. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 192 pp. Ebook: US$29.95. ISBN: 9781400883004.

Schorch, Philipp, Martin Saxer and Marlen Elders (eds.). 2020. Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond. London: UCL Press. 282 pp. Pb.: £20.00. ISBN: 9781787357495.

Cvajner, Martina. 2019. Soviet Signoras. Personal and Collective Transformations in East European Migration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 279 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-0226662398.

McGonigle, Ian. 2021. Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 220 pp. Pb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780262542944.

Sax, William and Claudia Lang. 2021. The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 346 pp. Hb.: €129.00. ISBN: 9789463721622.

As anthropologists well know, rhythms and cycles contain powerful and meaningful social processes. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale has been experiencing an important cycle in its life as an academic journal in the past two years after moving from Wiley to Berghahn as publisher and welcoming a new editorial team six months ago. It is time for the incoming team to express its gratefulness for the dedicated work accomplished by Lukas Ley, Nikolaï Ssorin-Chaikov, Lisa Pentaleri, and Jeanne Kormina, while writing the first editorial of the next cycle for SA/AS. We are delighted to walk the threshold with this issue placing a great emphasis on young researchers questioning the instable, unsteady and often contradictory fulcrums of the present world.

Through two significantly distinct ethnographic case studies, both based in Santiago, Chile, we argue for the need to attend to experiences which are not conceptualised by our interlocutors, or that remain ‘dark’ in terms of their ontological and representational properties. We point out that anthropology has been ill-equipped to deal with these ineffable margins, and point to conceptual arches which could be used transversally in what we call a ‘dark anthropology’. The two fields in question here are the ufological ‘absurd’ and early mothering experiences among low-income communities. What both have in common is that they defy anthropological figure-ground logics, where experiences are explained via their social contexts. We argue for an anthropology that can come to grips with non-linear, sometimes dark, socialities.

The so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Islamist doctrines or Islamic ideologies. They readily place all fallen combatants in a ‘martyrdom box’, linking them to Islamic sacrality and claiming they feel martyrs via martyrs’ ghostly whispers. Through ethnographic journeys in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, I unpack how they craft the ‘martyrdom box’ and communicate with the ghostly whispers. I argue that the Iranian revolutionary youth's perceptions of martyrdom and militant subjectivities emerge in relation to disbelieving histories that contest the state's narratives and their mystical relationships with martyrs. This article takes Iranian revolutionary youth as exemplars to explain how individuals implicated in political violence craft acts of ‘knowing’ and render death and dead ‘knowable’. In other words, instead of asking what is known, I proceed by unpacking how what is known becomes real and how the act of knowing contributes to the emergence of reality.

This article focuses on understandings of fog capture as an alternative water supply system in Lima. In neighbourhoods where state infrastructure is missing, fog catchers promise to alleviate residents’ dependency on private water suppliers. However, the utility of these micro-infrastructures is not self-evident. I show how a local NGO attempted to bring about commitment among prospective beneficiaries by framing the fog catchers against the size and incapacity of state infrastructure. In the NGO's rhetoric, the fog catchers’ limited scale vis-à-vis state infrastructure meant that they were better suited for addressing spaces that escaped state attention. Yet this also presented fog capture as a small-scale alternative that could be scaled up to respond to a problem of substantial ubiquity. The article concludes by suggesting that anthropologists’ uses of smallness as a trope for aggrandising their own methodological dispositions be repurposed for investigating the role of smallness in pursuits of macro effects.

In recent years the concept of performance (in the sense of effort) has come under criticism in Danish societal debates due to its dubious relation to increasingly widespread illnesses such as depression and stress. While acknowledging these potentially harmful consequences, we argue in this article that performance in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, yet it needs to unfold within a particular temporal logic in order to be both possible and not lead to stress. Based on empirical material from a professional handball club and an international software company, we show how immersion in the present moment and the immediate future enhances abilities to perform, and how anthropological studies of time open up for new ways of understanding high performance.

France re-established identity controls at its Italian border in 2015, leading ‘unauthorised’ migrants to cross the border by treading mountain trails at night. Mobility here occurs in low visibility. In this paper, I depart from sight as the preferred sense with which to grasp navigation and detection to explore the role listening plays in the making of alterity. Drawing from four months of fieldwork in the French–Italian borderland, I suggest in this article that unauthorised migrants are signalled as ‘sonic others’ by their attempt to remain silent. I also show that displacing alterity from the visual to the auditory makes room for creative mishearings: for identities to be forged in sound, and thus escape detection. As such, alterity may be more difficult to perceive by ear than by sight. Listening can reconfigure visual boundaries and invite us to wonder: what does difference sound like?

By attending to the conceptualisations of interfaith student and youth groups in Bandung, Indonesia, in response to state ideologies and regulatory policies, this article examines new approaches to the concept of pluralism – approaches that recognise the affective economies of how people construe and deal with difference. Conceptualisations of ‘authentic encounter’ not only pose a direct critique to the dividing effects of the legal codification and categorisation of difference – a critique that anthropologists working in societies characterised by ethnic and religious diversity voiced alongside feminist thinkers – but also reveal great potential for theoretical reflections from below. By drawing on contemporary anthropological work on pluralism in Southeast Asia and leaning on the anthropological literature on affect, this article shows how conceptualisations of ‘authentic encounter’, which circulate among groups of predominantly young activists, situate feelings and emotional states directly into ideas of how diversity should be dealt with. By doing so, they not only challenge the limits of pluralism as a politico-legal category but also espouse a concept of pluralism that is essentially embedded in the emotional life and social activities of those living with difference.

The world's ethos in 2021 grew increasingly realistic, focusing on constraints and practicalities, accounting for ‘bitter necessities’, and choosing defensiveness, preservation and stability over creation and exploration. The rise of realism in the world's public and private spheres presents a challenge to anthropology's ability to integrate a moral compass, empirical embeddedness and epistemological value in the discipline. This review of research published in some major peer-reviewed Anglophone European journals in 2021 seeks to vindicate the optimistic kind of moral realism by showing its inescapable entanglement in two of the most powerful items on anthropologists’ agendas today, the ontological and the future-oriented.

It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migration are increasingly becoming key topics in national elections.

Many thanks to Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for their response to my critique (Bråten 2022a) of their special section on ‘Utopian Confluences’ (especially, Blanes and Bertelsen 2021; Bertelsen 2021), and to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale for publishing the exchange. The theoretical questions that arise from our diverging stances are, hopefully, of general interest. While I take Blanes and Bertelsen (hereafter B&B) to argue an epistemologically all-inclusive irrealism, I favour an ontologically discerning realism. It is tempting to pursue the many theoretical entailments of this contrast further, but let me in this final reply comment on the character of the exchange itself: the kind of intellectual discourse that our diverging positions seem to foster. I believe B&B's response is illustrative of a ‘post-critical’ approach that recasts principles of scholarly debate in problematic ways. Addressing this issue allows me also to clarify a perplexity in their response: How could I possibly read their contributions as ‘irrealist’ and instances of a ‘migration out of academia’?

Pfeilstetter, Richard. 2022. The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship. Cultural History, Global Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency. New York: Routledge. 143 pp. Hb.: US$29.95/£25.00, ISBN: 9780367407483.

Elinoff, Eli. 2021. Citizen Designs. City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press. 310 pp. Hb.: US$80.00, ISBN-13: 9780824884598. Pb.: US$28.00, ISBN-13: 9780824888268.

Braukmann, Fabienne, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher and Rosalie Stolz (eds.). 2020. Being a Parent in the Field: Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork. Norman, OK: Transcript Press. 290 pp. Hb.: €45.00, ISBN: 9783837648317.

Over the last few months, grassroots activists based in urban Russia have got involved in humanitarian projects supporting the inhabitants of Mariupol, a city almost fully destroyed by what the Russian government calls a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Control over the city was surrendered to the Russian military in May 2022. Volunteers provide survivors of a three-month-long siege with clothes, food, medicine and firewood – the latter being important as heavy bombardment and severe fighting have damaged the heating systems of residential apartment blocks, which means that many individual apartments are kept warm this winter with the help of home- or industrially made metal wood-burning stoves. Yet, apart from bringing these material necessities to Mariupol, volunteers also return with new perspectives on the conflict. ‘Mariupolitans are remarkably resilient’, explained one of the volunteers. But they also pointed to the ‘flip side’ of this resilience: ‘This woman, for instance, thinks that after managing her daily survival thanks to the stuff that we bring, things might start looking up and [that] she might be eventually able to continue as before, living essentially a European life’. Volunteers saw their duty here also in explaining that the inhabitants of Mariupol had yet to fully grasp what kind of society they were now a part of. Conveying new regimes of silence and hierarchies can be seen as a form of grassroots humanitarianism. The present special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores cases of humanitarianism and their sociohistorical conditioning.

There has been an increase of anthropological interest in small-scale humanitarianisms that make situated claims to universality. The articles in this collection demonstrate that some genealogies of such situated universalisms have been explored more than others. Focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms, the goal is not to celebrate the standpoint of ‘radical alterity’ but rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising similarities of people's experiences is not reserved for the Western European epistemology. Anthropological research of small-scale humanitarianisms points to situated, alternative and sometimes even decolonising visions and practices of ‘the humanity’ understood as a framework for imagining and recognising broadly shared experiences. This collection asks how vernacular humanitarianisms are performed in everyday life, enabling particular forms of ethics, power and inequality. Thus, it keeps possibilities of social critique in sight and moves a conversation towards an ethnographically attuned perspective that explores the role of vernacular humanitarianisms in various projects of governance.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations. An Anthropological Account. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 288 pp. Hb.: US$98.35, ISBN 9781478007845.

Venkat, Bharat Jayram. 2021. At the Limits of Cure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 304 pp. Pb.: US$27.95, ISBN: 9781478014720.

Carney, Megan A. 2021. Island of Hope. Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 223 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 9780520344518.

Parry, Jonathan (in collaboration with Ajay T.G.). 2020. Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town. Abingdon: Routledge. xxx +702 pp. Hb.: £120.00, ISBN: 9781138095595.

Berliner, David. 2022. Devenir Autre. Hétérogénéité et Plasticité du Soi. Paris: Éditions la Découverte. 174 pp. Pb.: £14.79, ISBN: 9782348069697.

Collier, Stephen J. and Andrew Lakoff. 2021. The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 480 pp. Hb.: US$95.00, ISBN: 9780691199276.

As we all know, ‘urgent’ is a frequent subject heading used for emails and documents. It is also ubiquitous in calls to action against climate change and ongoing wars. In many ways, the word draws our attention to imminent crises, such as humanitarian disasters or the outbreak of diseases. Yet, the ethnographic contours of said urgency and imminence are far from self-evident. As this special issue's guest editors Andreas Bandak and Paul Anderson put it, urgency is always a claim of urgency. What is at stake in such claims, they submit, are not just the necessary resources, rights, expertise and power to ‘act now before it is too late’, but also a specific temporality. By separating the ‘now’ or ‘imminent’ from ‘before’ or ‘always’, time gets measured differently: it turns from being a quantitative entity to a qualitative and even incommensurable process. Indeed, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic marked the year 2020 as the dawn of a ‘new era’ in human biology and biopolitical governance (Bermant and Ssorin-Chaikov 2020). In a similar vein, other events turned out watershed moments in history: the 2008 financial crisis inaugurated the ‘age of austerity’, while 9/11 claimed the new ‘normalcy’ of living with terrorist threats and permanent war on terror – even if in many places around the world living with terrorist threats was rather normal for a long time before 9/11. If modernity can be viewed as a stretched-out present producing ‘newtime’ (Neuzeit, see Koselleck 2002), including irregular crises, it is no surprise that new eras keep appearing and supplanting each other all the time. What makes the temporality of urgency distinct from ‘modernity as time’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017) and particularly from its twentieth-century teleological futurism of capitalism, state socialism or neoliberalism, argue Bandak and Anderson, is its ‘presentism’ in the sense of François Hartog (2015).

From pre-emptive military strikes, humanitarian campaigns and precarious financial bubbles, to the climate change emergency and public health measures undertaken in response to COVID-19, we live in an era increasingly marked by discourses of imminence that bring a future close while also leaving it hard to imagine or inhabit. Claims of urgency – ‘act now before it is too late!’ – conduct the affective charge of these sometimes abject and often partially unimaginable futures. Yet urgency is rarely self-evident, but a claim in which the distribution of rights and resources, and particular forms of knowledge and expertise, are at stake. Which social actors are most invested in urgency and why? What possibilities does formatting a situation as ‘urgent’ foreclose and what questions does it make impossible to ask? What happens to claims of urgency when they become protracted and routinised? Alternatively, under what conditions might claims of urgency presage new openings?

Qu'il s'agisse de frappes militaires préventives, de campagnes humanitaires, de bulles financières précaires, de l'urgence du changement climatique ou des mesures de santé publique prises en réponse au coronavirus, nous vivons dans une ère de plus en plus marquée par des discours d'imminence. Ceux-ci rendent l'avenir proche tout en le laissant difficile à imaginer ou à habiter. Les revendications d'urgence — “agissez maintenant avant qu'il ne soit trop tard !” — conduisent la charge affective de ces futurs parfois abjects et souvent partiellement inimaginables. Pourtant, l'urgence est rarement une évidence, mais une revendication dans laquelle la distribution des droits et des ressources, ainsi que des formes particulières de connaissances et d'expertise, sont en jeu. Cette introduction explore la dynamique et les effets de ces processus et de leurs politiques. Quels acteurs sociaux sont les plus investis dans des logiques d'urgence ou de report et pourquoi ? Quelles possibilités le fait de caractériser une situation comme “urgente” exclut-il et quelles questions rend-il impossible à poser ? Qu'advient-il des revendications d'urgence lorsqu'elles se prolongent et deviennent routinières ? Par ailleurs, dans quelles conditions les affects d'imminence et les revendications d'urgence peuvent-ils présager de nouvelles ouvertures ? Avec cette introduction, nous rendons compte des conditions sociales, technologiques et existentielles dans lesquelles il devient naturel d'appréhender le futur comme imminent et d'expérimenter le social à travers l'urgence.

The Orange Order is an ultra-Protestant and ultra-British fraternity dedicated to professing ‘hostility to the distinctive despotism of the Church of Rome’, and to preserving Scotland's constitutional place within the UK. According to Scots-Orangemen, these two commitments are united in opposing Scottish National Party capitulations to a Papacy hell-bent on cleaving Scotland from the UK and her Protestant monarch. Thus, while the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum posed an existential threat to Orange Protestant-unionism, Brexit allowed push-back against an ultramontane plot to use the EU to destroy British sovereignty. Ironically – and awkwardly – the British unionism of Brexit (which the Order celebrates) looks set to reinvigorate calls for Scottish independence (which the Order dreads). This paper examines the acute political crises that such referendums create, arguing that Orange political urgency can only be understood as part of a more chronic (and thus less urgent, if no less serious) ‘Roman’ threat to Protestant ethno-religious supremacy.

L'Ordre d'Orange est une fraternité ultra-protestante et ultra-britannique qui se consacre à professer son “hostilité au despotisme distinctif de l’Église de Rome” et à préserver la place constitutionnelle de l’Écosse au sein du Royaume-Uni. Selon les Écossais-Orangistes, ces deux engagements s'unissent pour s'opposer aux capitulations du Scottish National Party devant une papauté déterminée à séparer l’Écosse du Royaume-Uni et de son monarque protestant. Ainsi, alors que le référendum de 2014 sur l'indépendance de l’Écosse représentait une menace existentielle pour le protestantisme orangiste, le Brexit a permis de repousser un complot ultramontain visant à utiliser l'Union Européenne (UE) pour détruire la souveraineté britannique. Ironiquement ¬— et maladroitement — l'unionisme britannique du Brexit (que l'Ordre célèbre) semble destiné à revigorer les appels à l'indépendance de l’Écosse (que l'Ordre redoute). Cet article examine les crises politiques aiguës que de tels référendums créent, en soutenant que l'urgence politique de l'Ordre d'Orange ne peut être comprise que comme faisant partie d'une menace “romaine” plus chronique (et donc moins urgente, mais non moins sérieuse) pour la suprématie ethno-religieuse protestante.

Crisis provokes a sense of urgency often experienced as vertigo – the intense disorientation as to where and when one belongs on the temporal timeline of pasts and futures. The nauseating affects of urgency can be located in both crisis as sudden rupture and as chronic condition – the former a cliff-edge moment where a schism in historical continuity induces dizziness and a sense of falling, the latter defined by inescapability and suffocating captivity. This article presents the relationship between crisis, urgency and the concept of vertigo, offering insights from philosophy and social theory. Further, based on ethnography from crisis-ridden Greece, it explores how vertigo orients collective timespaces and affectively fosters imaginative relationships with the imminent future.

La crise provoque un sentiment d'urgence souvent vécu comme un vertige — c'est-à-dire une désorientation intense quant à l'endroit et au moment où l'on se situe sur la ligne temporelle des passés et des futurs. Les effets nauséabonds de l'urgence peuvent être localisés à la fois dans la crise en tant que rupture soudaine et en tant que condition chronique — la première étant un moment de falaise où un schisme dans la continuité historique induit un vertige et un sentiment de chute, la seconde étant définie par l'inéluctabilité et la captivité suffocante. Cet article présente la relation entre la crise, l'urgence et le concept de vertige, en proposant des idées issues de la philosophie et de la théorie sociale. En outre, sur la base d'une ethnographie de la Grèce en crise, il explore comment le vertige oriente les espaces temporels collectifs et favorise affectivement les relations imaginatives avec l'avenir imminent.

This article focuses on a Pentecostal church in the Faroe Islands and the way in which members of the church relate to the concepts of life, death, Heaven and Hell. As I argue throughout, the concepts of damnation and Hell, which have historically played a central role in Evangelical churches in the country, have now started to become played down in favour of a ‘Gospel of Life’. I explore this change by paying attention to the existential stakes involved in living life as a member of a Christian movement which sees it as an imperative to spread the Gospel to individuals who are not confessed Christians. This work contributes to a growing amount of literature within the anthropology of Christianity that deals with Pentecostal and charismatic Christian movements. It is my argument that while much earlier literature dealing with phenomena such as conversion and millenarianism has been presented, the question of the ‘small’ biographical aspects of salvation and (the after-)life have not been adequately explored. Finally, I attempt to offer up an example of how changing ontological claims affect religious practice among the people in question.

Cet article se concentre sur une église pentecôtiste dans les îles Féroé et sur la manière dont les membres de l’église se rapportent aux concepts de vie, de mort, de paradis et d'enfer. Comme je le soutiens, les concepts de damnation et d'enfer, qui ont historiquement joué un rôle central dans les églises évangéliques du pays, ont maintenant commencé à être minimisés en faveur d'un “Évangile de la vie”. J'explore ce changement en prêtant attention aux enjeux existentiels de la vie en tant que membre d'un mouvement chrétien qui considère comme un impératif de diffuser l’Évangile à des individus qui ne sont pas des chrétiens confessés. Ce travail contribue à une quantité croissante de littérature au sein de l'anthropologie du christianisme qui traite des mouvements chrétiens pentecôtistes et charismatiques. Je soutiens que, si de nombreux ouvrages antérieurs traitant de phénomènes tels que la conversion et le millénarisme ont été présentés, la question des “petits” aspects biographiques du salut et de l'après-vie n'a pas été suffisamment explorée. Enfin, j'essaie d'offrir un exemple de la manière dont l’évolution des revendications ontologiques affecte la pratique religieuse chez les personnes en question.

Through the ethnographic exploration of the Syrian uprising, this article shows how revolutionary actions and times are shaped by competing ideas of martyrdom. Aiming at tracing Syrian revolutionary engagement through the fragments left by martyrs and witnesses; this article argues that the urge to act now during the 2011 revolution was linked to the imminence of personal and collective endings. Through revolutionary actions, Syrian revolutionaries seemed to actualise in the present their desired destiny, often understood as martyrdom among my interlocutors. Destiny thus appears not so much as a cosmological but as a moral frame of revolutionary actions, as well as an ex post facto theory of the revolution's defeat and the course of history.

À travers l'exploration ethnographique du soulèvement syrien, cet article montre comment la révolution est façonnée et subsumée dans un discours islamique du destin. Qu'advient-il du sens de la temporalité et de l'action révolutionnaires dans un contexte où le temps est prédéterminé et les actions orientées vers un futur inconnu mais pré-écrit ? Cet article soutient que l'urgence d'agir maintenant pendant la révolution de 2011 était liée à l'imminence de fins personnelles et collectives. Par le biais d'actions révolutionnaires, les révolutionnaires syriens ont tenté d'actualiser dans le présent leur destin souhaité, souvent projeté comme un martyre. De plus, la révolution était orientée vers la fin du régime syrien, à l’échelle historique, et vers le Jugement dernier, à l’échelle cosmologique. À travers la révolution syrienne, le destin apparaît donc comme un cadre moral des actions révolutionnaires, ainsi qu'une théorie ex post facto de la défaite de la révolution et du cours de l'histoire.

This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspondence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations – specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent event set in a present that is unfolding into an uncertain, immediate future provokes a new temporal orientation, for which the initial temporality of the scenario technology becomes its limitation.

Cet article explore le lien entre technologie et temporalité, et discute spécifiquement de la technologie des scénarios et de la temporalité de l'urgence, dans le contexte de la pandémie de coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Il illustre comment, malgré l'orientation inhérente de cette technologie vers la potentialité future, une fois qu'un événement réel se produit et que la temporalité de la préparation est remplacée par une temporalité d'urgence, la technologie du scénario est adaptée à la nouvelle temporalité en termes de forme et de contenu. En correspondance avec la recherche de “l'anthropologie du futur”, l'article s'intéresse aux changements d'orientations temporelles — plus précisément, au passage d'une temporalité de préparation (future) à une orientation temporelle d'urgence (immédiate) et à la manière dont un tel changement de temporalité affecte la technologie du scénario. Passer de la préparation à des incertitudes futures potentielles à la réponse à un événement urgent dans un présent qui se déroule dans un futur incertain et immédiat provoque une nouvelle orientation temporelle, pour laquelle la temporalité initiale de la technologie du scénario devient sa limite.

This article explores the intensification of contingency in an urban setting during the rapid spread of COVID-19 in Denmark. Based on interviews with fifty-one residents in the two largest cities in Denmark from the very first day of lockdown, it explores how the respondents expressed a friction between adapting to isolation, powerlessness and feelings of being out of time on the one hand, while simultaneously also being confronted with urgency through media and the immediacy of urban encounters on the other. Drawing on the works of François Hartog on presentism and Ben Anderson on terror preparedness, the central argument in this article is that with COVID-19 we see parallel negotiations of unknown futures near and far, in which urban contingency intensifies an already presentist sense of time. As one way of coping with the situation, people are actively lingering in a present without clear connections to past or future, fostering a form of stasis and hesitancy. In what we call an engaged lingering, urgency unfolds in seemingly contradictory ways to become simultaneously an everyday of frantic motion and paralysis.

Cet article explore l'intensification de la contingence dans un cadre urbain pendant la propagation rapide du COVID-19 au Danemark. Basé sur des entretiens avec trente-trois résidents de Copenhague dès le premier jour du confinement au Danemark, il explore comment les répondants ont exprimé une friction entre l'adaptation à l'isolement, l'impuissance et le sentiment d’être hors du temps d'une part, tout en étant simultanément confronté à l'urgence à travers les médias et l'immédiateté des rencontres urbaines d'autre part. S'inspirant des travaux de François Hartog sur le présentisme et de Ben Anderson sur la préparation à la terreur, où “l'ici et maintenant est suspendu entre le présent et un futur ‘comme si’” (2010), l'argument central de cet article est qu'avec COVID-19, nous assistons à des négociations parallèles de futurs inconnus proches et lointains, dans lesquelles la contingence urbaine intensifie un sens déjà présentiste du temps. Pour faire face à cette situation, les gens s'attardent activement dans un présent sans liens clairs avec le passé ou le futur, favorisant une forme de stase et d'hésitation. Dans ce que nous appelons un “attardation engagé”, l'urgence se déploie de manière apparemment contradictoire pour devenir simultanément un quotidien de mouvement frénétique et de paralysie.

Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic observation and reflection on humanitarian interventions’ power practices and on theoretical inspirations from Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Max Weber and Ernesto de Martino, we show that, in the current health crisis, new modes of truth, power and subjectivity have emerged in a space between ‘too late’ liberalism (i.e. the final moment of liberalism in which it reveals the inherent impossibility of its promise of prosperity and freedom for all) and ‘too soon’ authoritarianism (i.e. a self-imposed subordination to incontestable biosecurity imperatives). Self-sacrifice, self-imposed subalternity and hopeful, docile acceptance, or alternatively blind rage, in the face of the ‘inevitable’ characterise homo pandemicus, the ultimate liberal subject. Developed on sites of humanitarian intervention, the logic of ‘permanent emergency’ is the regulatory dispositive that perpetuates therapeutic domination on a planetary scale.

En s'appuyant sur vingt-cinq ans d'observation ethnographique et de réflexion sur les pratiques de pouvoir des interventions humanitaires, et inspirés des théories de Foucault, Agamben, Deleuze, Weber et De Martino, nous montrons que, dans la crise sanitaire actuelle, de nouveaux modes de vérité, de pouvoir et de subjectivité ont émergé dans un espace entre le libéralisme “trop tard” (c'est-à-dire le moment final du libéralisme dans lequel il révèle l'impossibilité inhérente de sa promesse de prospérité et de liberté pour tous) et l'autoritarisme “trop tôt” (c'est-à-dire la subordination auto-infligée à des impératifs incontestables de biosécurité). L'abnégation, la subalternité auto-imposée, la docilité naïvement optimiste ou encore la rage aveugle face, face à “l'inévitable” caractérisent l'Homo Pandémicus, le sujet libéral par excellence. Développée sur les sites d'intervention humanitaire, la logique de “l'urgence permanente” est le dispositif régulateur qui perpétue la domination thérapeutique à l’échelle planétaire.

The essays collected in this special issue of Social Anthropology ask questions about thxe status of claims to urgency. Such claims are a way of indexing a state of affairs; they qualify the ongoing stream of phenomena that we observe and take part in. They are, therefore, and as noted by the various contributions to this special issue, not self-evident. Such claims constitute the significance of events. The question for an anthropology of claims to urgency is: How and to what extent do such claims stabilise as truth claims? Or not.

Muecke, Stephen and Paddy Roe. 2020. The Children's Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 252 pp. Hb.: US$44.95. ISBN: 9781786616487.

Donzelli, Aurora. 2020. One or Two Words: Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press. xx +289 pp. Hb.: S$56.00. ISBN: 978-981-3251-14-4.

D'Angelo, Lorenzo. 2019. Diamanti. Pratiche e stereotipi dell'estrazione mineraria in Sierra Leone [Diamonds. Mineral Practices and Stereotypes in Sierra Leone]. Milan: Meltemi. 180 pp. Pb: €16.00. ISBN: 9788883539732.

Jackson, Michael D. 2020. Quandaries of Belonging: Notes on Home, from Abroad. London: Union Bridge Books. 187 pp. Kindle Edition: £23.75.

Sur, Malini. 2021. Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India–Bangladesh Border. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 227 pp. Pb.: US$24.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-5279-8.

Montesi, Laura and Melania Calestani (eds.) 2021. Managing Chronicity in Unequal States: Ethnographic Perspectives on Caring. London: UCL Press. 272 pp. Hb.: £40.00. ISBN: 9781800080300.

Koch, Insa Lee. 2018. Personalizing the State. An Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain. 290 pp. Hb.: £70.00. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780198807513.

Stensrud, Astrid B. 2021. Watershed Politics and Climate Change in Peru. London: Pluto Press. 240 pp. Hb.: US$54.74. ISBN: 9780745340203.

Li, Darryl. 2020. The Universal Enemy. Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 384 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 9781503610873.

Roszko, Edyta. 2020. Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. 288 pp. Hb.: £65.00. ISBN: 9788776942861.

Food waste is embroiled in a wide array of social efforts and actions in the contemporary EU. This article considers one site in the EU's capital where surplus supermarket food that is no longer sellable but is still edible is being used to fuel a job training programme. It argues that, rather than understanding the state's role in this process as a purely neoliberal tactic or as a capitalist profit-driven action, the repurposing of discarded food in order to create job opportunities and feed new populations has moral contours and enables specific forms of care.

This article examines self-referential humour in narrative accounts about experiences of conflict and community division, based on fieldwork undertaken in an interface area in Belfast in the late 2000s and in the 2010s. It has been a classic approach within anthropological studies of humour and jokes to focus on their socially or politically subversive nature. Some anthropologists, however, have viewed this approach sceptically, pointing out the Janus-faced nature of laughter that can turn against the weak, or the ambiguity that humour carries. Sharing the understanding that ambivalence and ambiguity are humour's intrinsic features, this article argues that these very features make humour crucial to people's everyday recollections and interactions in a post-conflict, still-much divided, society. Self-comicalisation helps people produce distance, either from themselves or the social group to which they belong, and direct attention to the absurdity of daily life under a long-term conflict in which mundane, day-to-day concerns and intense violence and suffering all flow in parallel. Jokes and comical storytelling capture this plurality of everyday life, which can be shared across the community division. Through attempting to sound out what could and could not be joked about, moreover, people seek out possible interactions in unfamiliar and uncertain relationships.

In July 2022, at the EASA meetings in Belfast, we passed the baton to a new editorial team comprising Chief Editors Dimitra Kofti (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens) and Isabelle Rivoal (University of Paris, Nanterre) as well as Assistant Editor Ville Laakkonen (Tampere University) and Book Review Editor Arne Harms (Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology). The new team has started to process new submissions and will introduce itself in one of the first editorials of 2023. We look forward to their contribution to this distinguished journal and wish them a felicitous term of office.

In recent (post-)conflict scenarios, the diversity and complexity of mass violence, including acts of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial or summary executions, have transformed how knowledge about such crimes is performed and produced socially. In inquiries into human rights violations, the search for, exhumation and identification of missing bodies often buried in mass graves have led distinct applications of forensic work to emerge. These have some differences from traditional crime scene investigation approaches. Novel interactions between forensic science practitioners and the communities where they operate have given place to unprecedented sociocultural, affective and scientific understandings of evidencing mass crimes. Drawing on different ethnographic experiences of unearthing human remains around the world, this collection considers how, in its judicial but also its extrajudicial application, forensic expertise has been transformed in connection to other epistemologies, collective and individual mourning, kinship, memory and a new politics and ethics of care in distinct state- and civil society-led pursuits to account for the dead and missing.

Jean-François Lyotard's famous characterisation of the postmodern condition as the ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1984: 23–24) has been influential in the anthropology of the 1980s, both in the sense of its internal methodological scepticism and as critical realism that questioned the post-utopian state of the external world that anthropology explored. The anthropology of globalisation and neoliberalism that followed from the 1990s onwards has also stressed presentism and the contemporary as qualities that were to be lived as well as researched without assuming their teleological ends. As observe the guest editors of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale's special issue ‘Curious Utopias: Dreaming Big Again in the Twenty-first Century?’, Ruth Prince and Tom Neumark, human expectations seemed to have undergone a ‘seismic shift’ away from grand dreams and narratives. But they also note that there has been a ‘concurrent and apparently countervailing trend: a return toward ambitious, even self-asserted utopian imaginations and schemes of economic, political and societal transformation’. Now, this is curious: discredited visions of utopian futures celebrate a return in the worlds studied by anthropology. Using curiosity as both a mode of anthropological inquiry and as a state of utopian imagination, this special issue tries to find a new home for utopia within anthropology.

This special issue focuses on a trend that appears to run counter to the recent fascination with scaled-down solutions to world problems. From the predictive powers of Big Data in Kenya to market-driven humanitarian attempts to tackle the world's ills, dreams of massive biometric identification in India and visions of health care ‘for all’, we are seeing a return to ostensibly, sometimes self-avowedly, ‘utopian’ imaginations and schemes of economic, political and societal transformation. These evoke a ‘universal’ scale, a politics of amelioration and ideas of social justice, routinely draw on a language of the collective, the public and the commons, while relying heavily on market logics and the privatisation of public goods. Such contradictory utopianism, and its inevitable failures, easily invites dismissal. Avoiding the comfort of this kind of critique, the contributors to this special issue draw on the idea of curiosity in its two senses. On the one hand, these utopias are themselves curious in the sense of being peculiar. Being reformative rather than radical, they seem to offer pared-down visions of social change, which remain within the status quo. On the other hand, a proper appreciation of their peculiarity requires curiosity. Grounded in ethnographic and historical research, the special issue explores the varied ambitions, relations and temporalities that inhabit new forms of utopianism, including their limitations and possibilities, hopes and failures, their engagements with policies and social movements, publics, markets and states, as well as the other political forms and social collectives that they support, subvert or ignite.

How modest can a utopia be? I approach this question with reference to the iShack, a solar electrification project in South Africa designed as an incremental upgrade for shack dwellers in informal settlements. Designed to provide basic energy for lighting and charging, the system also promises health and safety benefits by reducing the use of kerosene. Its promoters envision it as a bridge solution while people wait for better housing or municipal services. By offering an imperfect, stopgap form of enhancement, the venture exposes utopian expectations about progress, provoking critical anxieties about attenuated and unequal futures. At the same time, it bares the ecological limits of conventional infrastructure, the continuing inadequacies of state provision and the complex techno-politics of hope.

This issue marks the first time that Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is published by Berghahn Books. It is also the first time the journal is being published in an innovative ’subscribe-to-open’ model, an approach that has the potential to transform scholarly publishing. After a motion proposing the move to Open Access was approved at the EASA conference in Lisbon 2020, the membership voted overwhelmingly to end SA/AS's fifteen year contract with Wiley and move to Berghahn. The move has involved a great deal of careful preparation, and the journal editors would like to thank all those libraries who are continuing to support the journal, as well as the EASA members who are making this transition possible. We trust and hope your libraries will continue to support this sustainable Open Access model. We look forward to SA/AS making the most of the many opportunities this innovation offers. We thank Berghahn Books for its enthusiastic support of this journal during the technical transition and onward.

This article investigates how poorly monitored relocation programmes of a Chinese hydropower project in Laos have negatively influenced food experiences of resettled villagers as corporeal, social and communal beings. It extends the analysis of recent hydropower resettlement studies that have focused on how dam construction induces food insecurity but paid less attention to the villagers’ strategies to tackle food shortages. The point of departure is an anthropological investigation of two prevailing eating phrases in the new settlement: ‘eating together’ (commensal encounters) and ‘eating with the people’ (a corruption metaphor in Laos). I argue that many indigent interlocutors have become more food insecure and poorer after their resettlement because their livelihood and food support are inadequately provided, and the ‘big people’ allegedly steal their financial compensation. This precarious situation has deepened as the new neighbourhood arrangement has halted some commensal or food-sharing practices. This ethnographic analysis of how hydropower-induced hunger is experienced, viewed and confronted from below contributes to ongoing discussions in hydropower resettlement research and food anthropology.

We begin by thanking our colleague Eldar Bråten for taking the time to read and comment on our article with such thoroughness. We continue right away with a response. A key aspect of Bråten's critique is his claim that it is difficult to understand how we reason and, therefore, ‘how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose?’ In order to reply to such a concern, we choose to, first, take a step back and provide a backdrop to our anthropological thinking (and, therefore, reasoning and ‘prose’) and how it is situated within a longer trajectory of thought. Thereafter, we turn to his specific concerns with our approach to utopia.

Masco, Joseph. 2020. The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 440 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9781478011149.

Mack, Jennifer and Michael Herzfeld (eds.) 2020. Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 296 pp. Hb.: US$69.95. ISBN: 9780812252286.

Soula Audrey, Yount-André Chelsie, Lepiller Olivier and Nicolas Bricas (eds.) 2020. Eating in the City: Socio-anthropological Perspectives from Africa, Latin America and Asia. Versailles: Quæ. 158 pp. Pb.: 25 €. ISBN: 9782759232819.

Pauli, Julia. 2019. The Decline of Marriage in Namibia. Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. 296pp. Pb.: 44.99 €. Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-4303-9, PDF-ISBN: 978-3-83944303-3 [open access].

Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 272 pp. Hb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9780520305304.

Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, Anne Line Dalsgård, Mette Lind Kusk, Maria Nielsen, Cecilie Rubow and Mikkel Rytter (eds.) 2020. Anthropology Inside Out. Fieldworkers Taking Notes. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 224 pp. Ebook (Open Access) ISBN: 978-1-912385-23-2.

Montgomery, David W. (ed.) 2018. Everyday Life in the Balkans. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 442 pp. Pb.: US$42.00. ISBN: 9780253038173.

Wiegink, Nikkie. 2020. Former Guerrillas in Mozambique. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 280 pp. Hb.: US$55.00. ISBN: 9780812252057.

Regnier, Denis. 2020. Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition. Abingdon: Routledge. 194 pp. Hb.: £85.00. ISBN: 978-1-350-10247-7.

Blavascunas, Eunice. 2020. Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe's Last Primeval Forest. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 236 pp. Pb.: US$24.00. ISBN: 9780253049605.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13012 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13012 Ontology in post‐socialist driving]]> 29 4

In this article I consider what sense it makes to speak of a hybrid automobile ontology in contexts where its constitutive elements – driver, car and traffic system – are ruins. Then, on the basis of passenger‐seat ethnography conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I explore the consequences of the oxymoronic quality of these ruins, which as ‘remains’ both endure and decay, for experiences and senses of being among drivers living under conditions of post‐socialist transition.

Traffic in mega‐urban Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures. Like eddies of a river, traffic flows are abiotic actors – other‐than‐human physical phenomena that influence how traffic makes its way. But the liquid sense of flow in Vietnamese imaginings has unique qualities that challenge singular conceptualisations of the Anthropocene. Moving beyond human‐centredness, this paper re‐imagines traffic of metropolitan HCMC as the ()‐cene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine transformations of diurnal patterns of banal journey‐making where infrastructure routinely fails and ask how abiotic actors shape ways of inhabiting the Anthropocene and living with roads.

Cars are celebrated as the technical and symbolic epitome of modernity but are also heavily implicated in the making of climate change, imbricated within a seemingly all‐powerful global capitalist system. What can an anthropological analysis of traffic in urban areas tell us about the enduring strength of this system? While cars in Beirut are both desired and necessary to move about, strong feelings of frustration are taking shape among residents and commuters who face the ever‐congested roads of the capital city daily. This mounting frustration indexes an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ towards everyday automobility that has created explicit and concrete desire for alternative mobilities, particularly public transport, which scholars of automobility had pronounced dead. In this light, while cars remain objects of desire, in Beirut as elsewhere, an ‘excess’ of automobility – of modernity, we might say – is in fact weakening the dominance of cars, exposing a potential brittleness previously undetected. Acknowledging this process forces us to reconsider our modernist assumptions about the inevitable predominance of cars and offers hope for alternative mobility futures.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13032 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13032 Infrastructure, memory and identity in indigenous Evenki communities along the Baikal–Amur Mainline]]> 29 4

The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) project has been the embodiment of (post‐)Soviet modernisation with its promises of economic prosperity, mobility and connectivity. It boosted regional development and introduced new forms of mobility, but also accelerated sedentarisation, assimilation and social polarisation among Evenki, an indigenous people who had been living in the region long before the arrival of the megaproject. Complex and often ambiguous entanglements of Evenki with the BAM infrastructure – from participation in construction to the exchange of goods to loss of reindeer and land, shaped indigenous ways of life, memories and identities. The master‐narrative of the BAM seems to have been internalised by many Evenki and to have drowned out critical voices and indigenous identities. In this article, I direct attention to ‘hidden transcripts’, thereby giving voice to underrepresented memories and perspectives on the BAM within Evenki communities. Drawing on ethnographic materials and interviews with indigenous leaders, reindeer herders and village residents, who experienced the arrival of the BAM and have been entangled with the railroad in various ways, I seek to contribute to a critical and comprehensive history of the BAM and to explore the construction and articulation of indigenous identities large‐scale infrastructure and development projects.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13084 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13084 Housing strategies and the use of the city by homeless asylum seekers and refugees in Trento, Italy]]> 29 4

This contribution presents the results of an ethnographic research, conducted in the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy), which investigated the living conditions of refugees and asylum seekers outside the reception system and explored the heterogeneous and fragmented world of pathways they undertake in search of work and accommodation. From the point of view of housing, the investigation has shown how individuals put in place different kind of tactics and strategies. Generally, among these, informal settlements seemed to be the most common solution. However, what we focus on relates to both the effects produced on migrants’ everyday life by the environments and the material conditions of these settlements and the forms of re‐appropriation of the spaces exercised by the individuals. For instance, this is the case of ‘Le Albere’: a residential and commercial area designed by a famous architect which has become the ‘home’ of many refugees excluded by the reception system. How does this place affect migrants’ everyday lives? Why do they prefer to live in this area? How does their presence re‐shape such space? These are the main questions that this contribution aims to answer.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13095 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13095 Reassembling heritage and reconstructing the social in post‐disaster Japan]]> 29 4

Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused primarily on material heritage, whose risk of damage and disappearance is accelerating due to growing environmental crises. After Japan’s 2011 tsunami, however, heritage scholars there began probing a related question: what happens when supposedly ‘intangible’ heritage is damaged? Taking this question as a starting point, I ask how recent applications of assemblage theory in studies of heritage can shed light on destruction's role in forming and reforming places and peoples. Drawing on fieldwork in Japan’s disaster regions, I argue that disassembly is a form of damage rendering both the things mediating heritage and its reciprocal mediation of social life matters of concern. I suggest that the potential of loss lies in how heritage can be made to translate other interests during its reassembly. By contrast, attempts to perpetuate pre‐existing relations can render the social more rather than less precarious, depending on the context.

This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually frustrate the kind of market‐rule for which rankings have been hitherto legitimised among the public. The insight here is that rankings make of audit techniques neither simply a market proxy, nor merely the basis for bureaucratic managerialism, but a social technology or ‘apparatus’ () that simultaneously substitutes and frustrates market operations in favour of a more acutely stratified social order. This quality to the operation of rankings can then be connected to the chronic accumulation crisis that is the neoliberal regime of political economy, and to the growing political appetite therein for power‐knowledge techniques propitious for oligarchy formation and accumulation‐by‐dispossession in the kind of low‐growth and zero‐sum environment typical in real terms to societies dominated by financialisation. A dialectical approach to rankings is suggested, so that a more effective engagement with their internal and practical contradictions can be realised in a way that belies the market‐myths of neoliberal theory.

The United Kingdom’s ‘hostile environment for immigrants’ is having distressing effects on people of African Caribbean heritage, especially those who have been threatened with deportation. While some research demonstrates a strong connection between the threat of deportation (deportability) and abjection, deportable migrants may also develop strategies (e.g. religious participation) to work around state controls. Jamaican family relations and spiritual practices emphasise intersubjectivity. This paper presents intersubjective ethnographic work conducted with a (formerly) deportable research partner, among Jamaican‐born Rastafari men who migrated to the UK in the 1990s as young adults. Restrictions against working during deportation appeals leave Rastafari men with the options of idleness, odd jobs in the informal economy or crime (typically selling drugs). Rastafari men find the discipline required to survive deportability through spirituality and engage in a variety of bodily rituals to generate positive energies, which help them remain calm and healthy. Vigilant attention to manners and dress are essential to raising social (and financial) capital on the road. The case of Rastafari migrants in the UK reveals a need for further expansion of ethnographic research into hostile environments from intersubjective perspectives that explore spirituality and deportability in diaspora families.

The idea that road safety could be secured using sound – particularly talkback radio and music – is fascinating. This paper explores Ford’s recent and unprecedented level of investment in car stereos in its 2018 models alongside the terrifying 2014 anti‐speeding commercial produced by the Northern Ireland Department of Environment (Road Safety). The commercial makes use of one musical track styled in two different ways to sonically represent safety and danger. Ford’s use of sound to create a feeling of safety for the driver, and the Department of Environment’s use of particular qualities of musical sound to craft ideals of safe and dangerous driving raise interesting questions: what is the relationship of sound to road safety? Why are specific qualities of sound related to safety and others to danger? I argue that conferral of safety (actual or fantastical) involves letting the dangerous world outside the car inside – even though we might think of safety as something we assure for ourselves by sealing out the external world, exercising control over it from our dashboards. I argue too that most explanations of why some qualities of sound assure safety obscure the workings of post‐Fordist regulation that is so ‘natural’ its power goes unnoticed.

Digital labour scholars have produced insightful analyses of the unpaid, creative, affective labour performed by users on social media platforms. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the hidden labour of content moderators: underpaid, contingent workers who enable the sanitised online spaces that users take for granted by removing disturbing content. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with third‐party Facebook content moderators in the USA and Ireland, I argue that the case of content moderation affords us a new way of putting these approaches into conversation with one another. Specifically, I illustrate how content moderators perform affective labour – for themselves and for the platform – in ways that make possible the monetisation of users’ cultural activities. In doing so, I draw attention to the human costs of maintaining user ‘safety’ and thus the profitability of large social media platforms.

This article explores the relationships between the body, gendered dispossession and agency under conditions of austerity in Portugal. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in a Portuguese post‐industrial town, this article focuses on the examination of how concrete physical experiences and social anxieties framed working‐class women’s experiences and explanations of the austerity‐led crisis of social reproduction and the ways through which the body was mobilised as a metaphor to make sense of forced and disruptive reconfigurations of the means of livelihood reproduction. It examines how working‐class women resorted to embodied practices, knowledges and moralities as a way of fulfilling provisioning pursuits, to assert rights, entitlements and aspirations. Throughout this article, women’s bodily experiences and embodied practices, knowledges and moralities are the main point of entry from which to reflect on the gendered, contested and negotiated nature of the austerity economic and political project. This article argues for the relevance of addressing the mobilisation of historically embodied legacies of gendered and classed dispossession in the making of ‘actually existing austerity’.

This review article surveys all of the articles published in the major Anglophone European social anthropology journals in 2020. Taking a perspective from Joel Robbins’ theorising of ‘the anthropology of the good’ as a critique of the primacy of ‘dark anthropology’, it highlights the rich range of ethnography and analysis recently produced. Focusing on the continuing interest in ontology, environment, relations and the problems inherent in anthropological comparison, the review article identifies how – during the crisis of the COVID‐19 pandemic – the discipline has continued to respond with vigour and resilience. An ongoing resurgence of the anthropology of religion is noted, as is the emergence of powerful emic exploration of such global phenomena as care, debt and corporate capitalism. The review article concludes with a reflection on the ideological and epistemological challenges social anthropology continues to face, both in the academy and more widely.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13112 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13112 Auto‐Anthropocenes]]> 29 4

Is the planet on a one‐way collision course with self‐destruction? Are cars, roads and everything that goes along with them the main culprits for the end of the world as we know it? In addressing the nebulous, amorphous and material ties between vehicles and infrastructure, this Special Section of provides some cross‐cultural histories for better understanding commonplace as well as alternative paths, tracks and travel experiences. It also offers ethnographic narratives for the social lives, cultures and lived environments of everyday micro‐journeys or the hyper‐mobilities of human imaginaries. This collection of essays reaches a vantage point for a broad perspective on our long‐term relationship with transport infrastructures – helping to assess their impact on both the built environment and the Earth’s ecosystems.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13009 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13009 Militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar]]> 29 3

The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this article, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are (a) in the natural environment and (b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. It is however channelled through a new economy of life, epitomised in the plantation, nourished in excessive feasting, and maintained by the kinship dynamics of capture and care.

Over the past ten years, the Catalan independence movement has intensified and gained considerable social support. State–region relations hit bottom in late 2019, when demonstrations and night street fights occurred as a result of the Constitutional Court decision to imprison Catalan pro‐independence politicians. In the Basque Country, a reverse process may be observed: after decades of its violent ‘Troubles’, the Basque Country now enjoys peace and channels its pro‐independence politics in formal directions. Beyond discursive messages, the Basque and Catalan movements have deployed body techniques to call attention to their political objectives. The historically changing moods and dispositions of the two movements may be traced through the corporeal performance techniques they have chosen as their symbols and allegories. The hand, palm, fist, skin, touch and verticality become ideological configurations that reproduce political imaginaries that express the dispositions, risks and desires of nationalist constructions.

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This ethnography examines two Syrian refugee women’s experiences of waiting while living in the Turkish–Syrian border town of Antep. Since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, 3.5 million Syrians have left their homes to seek refuge in Turkey. With the 2014 Temporary Protection Regulation granting Syrians temporary residence and limited access to social services, the Turkish state developed state of exception strategies aimed at minimising the impact of incoming refugees. Living within the temporality of war and refugeehood, Syrian refugees are subjected to various forms of waiting that are constitutive of temporal dispositions and strategies with which they negotiate the vicissitudes of the war, the precariousness of refugee life in Turkey, their emotionally and politically charged sojourn in the borderlands close to their home, and their future‐oriented expectation of war’s end. Engaging with the anthropological concepts of waiting, patience and migration, we examine how two Syrian women refugees navigate the uncertain temporality of their lives. To cope with the Turkish state’s arbitrary exceptional policies that constantly pause and interrupt the flow of daily life, they replace waiting for the demands of the present with forms of patience that keep their future expectation of return to Syria alive.

This paper explores counterinsurgency strategies of the Turkish state during the 1990s and how they affected people’s experience of time and space in Yüksekova, a Kurdish border town in the south‐eastern tip of Turkey. The paper takes up the perspective of children to think about how forcing people to wait indefinitely enables new forms of population and territorial control. Drawing on autobiographical and ethnographic accounts, the paper demonstrates how the Turkish state establishes and maintains its sovereignty in Kurdish borderlands by constricting space, forcing a different rhythm onto the practices of everyday life and instilling ordinary existence with a sense of uncertainty.

This paper looks into the lives of displaced people and their material bonds with the past while waiting for justice during exceptional times in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s Kurdistan. Diyarbakir is known for its central location in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey for many decades. In August 2015, the old city of Diyarbakir called Sur joined other resisting cities and districts in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where Kurdish militants built barricades all around their controlled neighbourhoods against the state’s violent attacks and declared autonomy. Months after the beginning of the resistance, the Turkish state managed to take back control of Sur after heavy clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. All the resisting neighbourhoods of Sur were razed to the ground, and close to 24,000 residents were displaced. Since then, a massive urban transformation project for Sur has been in the making. The everyday survival of the displaced people from Sur depends on the ways they negotiate with the state in a long process of waiting. Bringing together different accounts of waiting, I intend to shed light on temporal dimensions of forced displacement embedded in the remnants of the past and shaped by present history of subjugation and state violence.

This article focuses on the transformations of therelationship to the future and to its knowledge among mountain populations inSoutheast Asia in a context of economic and social change. Since its spectaculareconomic development in the 2000s, Laos has experienced an increase inrural‐urban migration, which has transformed the configuration of the country.The massive resettlement of highlanders at the end of the 1990s (and continuing to this day), has led to the gathering of peoplefrom former mountain villages into large,multi‐ethnic villages, towns and even cities. This new context of lifegives rise to new aspirations among these "pioneers of the highlands"and thus the desire to better understand the future in order to know and securemore individual and numerous choices. The objective of this article is to showthe transformations of the highlanders’ relationship to time and to the future,through an insight into the ritual procedures linked to their new aspirations.

This article constitutes an argument for both the use and expansion of the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, as established in his recent work (AIME; 2012). Drawing on ethnographies of education as a methodology for empirical inquiry and specifically on meta‐ethnography as a methodology for establishing objectivised knowledge concerning education in a manner that is commensurate to the underpinning epistemological and ontological principles of AIME, this article explicates and then applies the theoretical components of AIME to the field of education research. In doing so and it proposes that education be added to Latour’s schema as an additional mode of existence.

This article provides ethnographic insights into the Southeast Asian peasantry’s engagements with agrarian change. It speaks both to Southeast Asian studies’ longstanding interest in the dynamics of socio‐economic transformation, and to anthropology’s burgeoning focus on how future‐oriented aspirations are produced, negotiated and enacted under specific socio‐political, material and historical conditions. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnic Khmu hamlet in northern Laos, I show upland peasants on the cusp of agrarian transition engaging aspirational migration through ‘controlled experiments’: pioneering pursuits of betterment, crucially buttressed by multiple, locally specific factors. These factors include a still largely intact peasant natural economy, historically endowed intimacy with the modernising state and, not least, a precariously persistent ‘intergenerational contract’ in which youthful mobility and parental stability remain ambiguously yet irreducibly intertwined. Notably, whereas much research on Laos has focused on communities (adversely) impacted by transition, this article discusses a community that is both politically connected and, concomitantly, still relatively unscathed by the (transitory) detriments of commodification, enclosure and dispossession. In sum, this article confirms that while striving for a better future is probably a basic aspect of the human condition, definitions and pursuits of such futures are contextually contingent, not least along generational lines.

Drawing on various ethnographic case studies from upland Southeast Asia, this special issue explores uplanders’ pioneering agency and challenges the stereotype of the remote and marginal uplander. We consider upland areas as dynamic sites of future‐making and change – initiated by pioneering individuals or local elites who seek out and explore different potential sources of (economic and spiritual) potency. By using the figure of the pioneer as heuristic device, we realign our ethnographic gaze on uplanders by giving particular emphasis to: (1) agents of sociopolitical dynamics in Zomia, (2) questions of remoteness and pioneering mobility, (3) old and new sources of potency, from ‘the state’ to the religious domain, (4) aspirations and future‐making and (5) pioneers of change and emergent elites.

This article focuses on the role of new Hmong religious leaders – predominantly young men – who have played an important role in spreading Protestant Christianity across Vietnam’s highlands over the past 30 years. These pastors and evangelists have directly challenged the authority of previously established Hmong local elites, whose legitimacy rested on traditional religious authority and/or state patronage, causing significant social conflict along the way. Some new Christian pioneers have gained local elite status as political and development brokers for their community, enjoying a potent combination of spiritual authority, strong external networks and financial success. As such, international religious networks can function as alternative patrons to the state for well‐placed Hmong Christian elites to tap into and redistribute to their communities – to varying degrees. Contextualising such leadership dynamics within wider anthropological scholarship of upland Southeast Asia affirms the ‘pioneering ethos’ of local elites in challenging, complying with or mimicking state forms of governance in their attempts to draw in and channel external potency. This highlights the degree of political manoeuvring space available to non‐state actors in a supposedly authoritarian state, as well as ongoing tensions and controversies facing pastors who negotiate ambiguous relationships with powerful external forces.

Given that houses have become a key signifier of an orientation towards the future, several villagers in Pliya can be regarded or regard themselves as pioneers of the construction of a new type of house. I will suggest here that the construction of new concrete houses is not to be understood merely as an adoption of lowland styles but as a self‐conscious and selective use of a style of building. Those who are pioneering these houses also discuss their efforts in terms of pioneering acts, emphasising the self‐taught nature of their appropriation of new aspects of craftsmanship. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork among the Khmu of Pliya, and especially on more recent fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, I wish to argue that the way in which new houses have entered the local cosmos and are materialised by pioneering builders highlights a pioneering ethos that infuses local attempts at future‐making, from wet rice cultivation to concrete villas.

Hat Ang, mythological culture hero of the Phong (an ethnic minority in Laos), exemplifies the figure of the upland pioneer. Taking the legend of Hat Ang as a vantage point, this paper discusses the ethnohistory of this specific Austroasiatic group and offers a mythological perspective into the discussion of uplanders’ agency and future‐making. This key myth of the Phong addresses questions of remoteness and relationality, of individual aspirations and hubris. Therefore, investigating mythology is key to understanding past and present representations of Phong culture and society within a multi‐ethnic upland context.

This paper explores infrastructural disruptions of utility provisioning caused by stealing of copper infrastructural parts in a copper‐processing town in Serbia. Such illicit practices of infrastructural stripping were part of copper circulation via theft, cynically referred to as ‘recycling’ of copper, and were incentivised by increased copper price and the specific local economy. Drawing from ethnography among the citizens who reacted to the disruption of the heating provision caused by infrastructural stripping and the disfranchised citizens who illegally recycled parts of infrastructures, I shift so far predominant scholarly focus on engagements with infrastructural material flows and/or their stasis to show how governance hinges on the very liquidation of infrastructural channels. Following the underlying mechanics of the ‘state’ and its uneven distributive politics, I argue that stripping of infrastructures and the consequential disruptions were vital in configuring the state as a desired framework necessary to regulate everyday (infrastructural) lives. I analyse how such process was arranged infrastructurally via socialist and post‐socialist patterns, which enabled the maintenance of some configurations of power (from the socialist past) to govern the everyday (infrastructural) lives. The paper contributes to the intersection between anthropological literature on infrastructures and the state and the study of post‐socialist infrastructures.

After recognising Hmong Protestantism, the Vietnamese state continued an ‘anti‐conversion’ politics. It did so by encouraging the revival of what they saw as traditional Hmong religion as a bulwark against Protestantism and by enriching the range of cultural commodities for the growing ethno‐tourism market. For the non‐converts, not only their resistance of Christianity began to be redefined as ‘the battle’ against Christianity, their belief and practices, up to then highly despised of by authorities, began to be restructured in order to gain new strength to rebound on the national and global religious stage. The new consciousness of the non‐Christian Hmong, however, worried the Vietnamese state. This contribution charts the annual competitions held since 2005 between Christian and non‐Christian groups in Lao Cai province in organising yearly Hmong communal rituals. It shows that what was meant to become a folklorised bulwark against Christianity became a new mêlée of ritual competition, as pioneering Hmong quickly seized the central stage. Ritual festivals thus become arenas of identity struggle in which none of the usual identity markers (secular, religious, communist, Christian, modern, traditional) can be taken at face value.

This article situates the case of in a broader context of sovereignty, law and waiting in Turkey. To do so, I put the production of a category for the relatives of the disappeared through a peculiar temporal lens, scrutinising different waiting types that create intertwined notions of hope, loyalty, anxiety and ambiguity. Different forms of waiting mean different temporalities, along with other demands. I thus scrutinise the performances, acts and demands of these temporalities. I then analyse the trajectory for , revealing insights into the limits of legal space and the notion of justice, since this trajectory interrupted the typical waiting patterns for the relatives of the disappeared, transforming their temporal subjectivity. Although it ended without any form of recognition, the case itself was followed by the relatives of the disappeared, who participated attentively. This participation, I believe, reveals crucial information about temporality, subjectivity, violence and legal space in Turkish Kurdistan.

Due to the difficulties in accessing detention facilities, the discussion on immigration detention often draws on limited empirical data with varying degrees of attention paid to the heterogeneity of the detained population and their different stakes in an impending removal. Although a closed institution, various legal and administrative processes related to the enforcement of immigration decisions render immigration detention a relational field. Drawing on my fieldwork experiences while conducting multi‐sited ethnographic research on the immigration detention system in Finland, I discuss how methodological choices, theoretical presuppositions and circumstantial factors affect the production of knowledge on immigration detention. I address the relevance of: 1) the case selection among detainees with considerably varying immigration histories, social situations and detention times; 2) a multi‐sited research setting to conceive the various processes of immigration enforcement during detention; 3) an engaged research strategy to access detainees’ first‐hand knowledge of their immigration cases beyond dramatic representations; and 4) the employment of administrative data in contextualising empirical findings. I argue for the importance of examining detainees’ negotiations with the deportation apparatus, which shapes available options for detainees as well as determines the outcome of detention from the ‘outside’, despite its absence in everyday life in detention.

Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet in Laos show that these movements have a gendered dimension.

: This special section sheds light on the relationship between sovereignty and temporality through practices of waiting in the militarised Kurdish cities and border provinces of Turkey. It reveals different feelings, practices, discourses, and imaginations derived from the waiting experience of citizens and refugees living in the midst or aftermath of the states of exceptions at the margins of the sovereign states.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13102 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13102 Ethnic minority elites pioneering self‐representations in northern Myanmar]]> 29 3

This paper explores the pioneering work for future‐making by one of Myanmar’s non‐dominant ethnic groups. Specifically, it examines how the Christian Lisu elite strategically, and somewhat opportunistically, use ‘traditional culture’ to perform ethnicity against the background of their ‘double‐minority’ status vis‐à‐vis the dominant populations of the (Kachin) state and (Myanmar) nation. It analyses heterogeneous social actors and conditions that have influenced a Christian elite’s renewed interest in their pre‐Christian traditions, as well as the challenges involved in translating the singularity of its abstraction into various embodied forms. Central to this process is the selection, revision and standardisation of previously marginalised artefacts and practices, placing them in the domain independent of religion (Christianity). These embodied forms are readily tagged as ethnically Lisu whenever assertion of difference is needed. I argue that the emerging space has become a significant discursive site relating to Lisu self‐representations of modern selves and relations. It is also crucial in the Christian elite’s efforts to gain competitive political, economic and cultural resources for the future development of the Burmese Lisu (especially the younger generation) while maintaining the church’s important influence on public and private life in the Lisu Christian community.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13011 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13011 Emotions and narratives of leaving and remaining in precarious academia]]> 29 2

In reflections on modern ‘neoliberal’ universities, narratives of quitting academia hold a special fascination. This is evidenced by the recent proliferation of ‘quit lit’: emotionally charged public statements elucidating people’s departures from academia. Yet scholarly examinations of quitting are exceedingly rare, especially those of precarious and ‘early career’ academics whose likelihood of departure is high. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with precarious academics in Australia, as well as reviewing worldwide Anglophone ‘quit lit’ authored by such academics. I distinguish accounts of quitting, leaving, remaining and returning, exposing how these labels reflect different positionalities and narratives. Uncovering the emotional dimensions of leaving and remaining, I reveal how emotions are expressed unequally depending on people’s capacities to depart and temporal proximity to leaving. Well‐rehearsed declarations of love and passion intersect with claims of no longer caring or losing hope, as well as with expressions of grief and anger. Expanding on literatures on the ‘hidden injuries’ of academia and the pernicious effects of ‘hope’ and ‘love’ on workers, I demonstrate how unequal expressions – in precarious academics’ ability to tell ‘quitting stories’ and to express less‐than‐optimistic emotional accounts – expose hierarchies among precarious academics and reflect their uneven capacities to resist.

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Since 2004, when Poland joined the EU, and especially since 2007, when it joined the Schengen zone, the Polish–German border, formerly perceived and experienced as highly controlled, has been increasingly described as a disappearing one. Yet the border as a spatial organisation of difference is still a part of the everyday experience of the inhabitants of the region. Especially younger Polish people see the border as a valuable resource, with a potential to make their life easier and better. I show how the continuous presence of the (open) border influences the practices of people on the ground. I conceptualise this border as a set of multiple tidemarks that are simultaneously visible and consequential, as well as ephemeral and changing. From the perspective of people living next to the state border, the multifarious border has strong virtual aspects – it is a set of potentialities that can be, but do not have to be, realised as resources.

Anthropology is nothing if it is not a particular way of describing the world. Yet what is most precious to it – the terms and concepts that mark it as a discipline – can also be the most tricky. When resurgent boundaries and exclusions twist truth telling and faking in any which way, anthropology might find a new urgency in thinking about the conceptual life it tries to express. How it engages has always depended on (attention to) how terms are used, something shared with those who people its subject matter. Critical attention has never been more important. An exploration into the colourings and resonances of diverse verbal usages, old and new, points to moments where language works both with us and against us. Indeed supports for xenophobia and the like may be embedded where least expected. Out of it all, the lecture imagines a future for anthropological exposition. There could be no better place to start than in EASA's many‐languaged company.

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Based on an ethnographic study carried out in 2015–16 in a New York DNA testing centre, this article focuses on the different costs (economic, emotional, symbolic and political) of a paternity test result. Whether a mother is trying to defend her son’s interests, or a man wants to check the genetic authenticity of his parentage, the material drawn on here reveals the issues at stake in situations understood as enigmas that can be solved. What is the value of these enigmas, at the heart of family histories? In other words, what uncertainties do people want to resolve by identifying a biological father? Rather than taking a reductive approach framing the relationship to secrets as relating to a deep‐seated or even imperative ‘need to know’, this article, instead, problematises the current preoccupation with ‘truth making’.

Liberalism follows a grammar when representing voluntary social relationships that involve some element of exchange; it reduces them to relations of pure exchange. This paper examines the transmission of this grammar across cultural lines, from the progressive officials comprising Brazil’s Workers’ Party government (2003–2016) to the inhabitants of the country’s northeastern backlands () whose ‘clientelistic’ politics the officials sought to dismantle. By analysing ’ abandonment of the once‐common practice of displaying campaign propaganda on their homes, I hope to explain the political implications of the spread of this grammatical logic – what I call the – to a people who have long embedded political transactions within elector–politician ‘friendships’.

This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on fieldwork with artist‐activists in post‐recession Dublin, I recount their fraught efforts to use adventurous artistic expression to provoke a critical awakening in an audience of strangers, who instead respond with derision. My focus is thus on a narrow but prevalent feature of artists’ work and lives, and the public’s experience of challenging genres of provocative public criticism: the encounter with unintelligibility and alienation in the public sphere. I thus deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as a tool through which to consider the factors that mitigate against artists establishing the desired critical relationship with audiences. Nevertheless, though these parrhesiastic encounters do not succeed, I argue that they do not yield an absence of social relations but relations of an anti‐social kind. Departing from readings of parrhesia as a form of individualism, corrosive to relationality, or a playful reaction against the failures of liberal democratic politics, I make a case for framing parrhesia as a relationship of contestation over which kinds of public criticism are judged to be intelligible and valuable responses to moments of cultural crisis in northern liberal democracies.

This paper traces the evolution of discourse about liberal democracy among Polish‐Vietnamese pro‐democracy activists, since their original mobilisations in the 1990s until today. Documenting what I call the two waves of Polish‐Vietnamese activism, I describe how their ‘diasporic liberalism’ shifted from a stance of opposition to communist ideology, and from a belief in the ‘end of history’, to an approach focused on bottom‐up democratisation and embrace of transnational frames of environmentalism, rule of law, rights and ‘civil society’. Such evolution of activists’ discourses and networks ultimately tracks the transformation of Western liberalism itself, both in terms of the ascendancy of neoliberal imagery of ground‐up citizenly empowerment and, more recently, the emergent right‐wing challenge to liberal‐democratic order in Europe, in response to neoliberal dislocation of the traditional working class. Analysing the activists’ shifting engagements with Polish liberal thought and Vietnam’s socialist democracy, this paper makes the case for thinking of liberalism as lacking an original or essential form. Rather it can be thought of in diaspora‐like terms, as a ‘globally mobile category’, brought into existence in varied, situated ways through ongoing mobilisation.

Despite extensive writing about liberalism in anthropology, liberal subjects and publics remain strangely elusive as objects of ethnographic enquiry. Anthropologists have mostly studied liberalism in light of new forms that supersede and reconfigure it, or in light of the marginalised subjects it excludes. These approaches have produced useful critical insights, but they have left liberal publics and subjects themselves hanging in a zone of ethnographic indistinction, front and centre of the picture as objects of critique, and yet persistently out of ethnographic focus. Liberalism itself features in the end as little more than a mirage, a constitutive impossibility: a practice that is abstract, a place of no place, an impersonal form of personhood. This paper explores the limits of these approaches by considering different possible readings of an ethnographic setting in which ‘the liberal public sphere’ is imagined, challenged and policed: a courtroom in Paris that specialises in press law. The paper suggests one potential way out of the ethnographic elusiveness of liberalism, by taking seriously the ways in which the impossibility of liberal ideals is already critically acknowledged by (and written into) the practices, institutions and forms of subjectivity that nevertheless seek to orient towards them.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13042 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13042 Populism, fundamentalism and liberal desire]]> 29 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13043 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13043 A cultural conception of politics]]> 29 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13045 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13045 Studying far‐right transformism]]> 29 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13049 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13049 Notes on the anthropology of the far right]]> 29 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13053 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13053 Introduction]]> 29 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13057 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13057 Further thoughts on class, value and the return of the repressed]]> 29 2

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Liberalism has been fundamental to the making of the modern world, at times shaping basic assumptions as to the nature of the political, and in other cases existing as a delimited political project in contention with others. Across its long history, liberal projects have taken a diverse range of forms, which resist easy reduction to a single logic or history. This diversity, however, has often escaped anthropological attention. In this introduction to our special section on Grammars of Liberalism, we briefly trace this historical diversity, interrogate anthropological approaches to conceptualising liberalism and offer a broad framework for studying liberalism that remains attentive to both continuity and difference. First, we argue for attention to how the political claims made by liberal projects unfold at the levels of values, their interrelations (morphology) and the underlying rules governing the expression and combination of values, and their intelligibility as liberal (grammar). Second, we argue for empirical attention to how values are expressed and liberal projects assembled across different social forms. We argue that this approach enables anthropology to grasp the diversity of liberal political projects and subject positions while still allowing scholars to approach liberalism critically and to interrogate its underlying logics.

I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non‐autological freedom understood as an ability to engage in a certain practice while thinking through its conditions and constraints from multiple perspectives and in a way that my interlocutors saw as respectful of others. Linking anthropological discussions of freedom with a focus on ordinary ethics, I offer an understanding of freedom as a relational category practised through an open and shared deliberation and imaginative identification, which echoes Polanyi’s notion of social freedom. Gay men who pursued love and sexual fulfilment as well as stringent family expectations did not enact freedom as always‐already individualised subjects who made autonomous choices; they came into being as particular socio‐moral persons by deliberating either collectively, through an actual conversation, or by engaging in imaginative identification with others. By placing both relationality and deliberation at the heart of freedom, this article contributes to anthropological discussions about this concept.

This article explores the place of liberal subjectivity in the professional culture of Ukrainian journalists to analyse how ideas originating in contexts of hegemonic liberalism at the core of the global capitalist system, are taken up on its postsocialist margins. I outline how certain Anglo‐American notions of good journalistic practice, which encode traits of liberal subjectivity, are borrowed and elaborated by a Western‐funded movement for an anti‐oligarchic liberal media reform in Ukraine. These ideals are then taken up within oligarch‐controlled media, a context that the reformers see as inimical to liberalism. Through an ethnographic portrait of an editor‐censor at a major oligarch‐owned TV channel in Ukraine, I analyse how these professional ideals simultaneously uphold oligarchic patronage and extend the reach of liberal politics in Ukraine. This reveals how in the force field of global capitalism both the reformers and those whom they seek to reform are part of the same, contradictory and fractured, liberal formation. I propose that to better understand cases like this, we need to learn to see liberalism in fragments: as always partial and incomplete and as constituted by multiple elements.

This afterward draws together insights from the articles in the special section on liberalism and points to a growing disjuncture between the liberalism of those who claim to represent liberalism and the liberalism of those who are accused of illiberalism even as they engage in a variety of liberal practices. The articles suggest that it is important to look for capillary liberal practices in the shadows of the current liberal battlegrounds. This might require a renaming exercise to distinguish the currently dominant form of liberalism from its more subtle manifestations.

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Walking has become a common form of practice in contemporary art. Recent anthropology has been influenced by art walking practices. In this paper, however, I show significant differences between art walking and what we could call ‘Walking anthropology’. The former is more explicitly engaged, in many cases, in the ‘politics of walking’. These politics, on the one hand, could be based on ideas of walking as an everyday prefiguration of a future utopian society. Yet on the other hand, walking art could also be a critique of existing forms of everyday power and mobility as they are inscribed in the landscape and the city. In walking anthropology these concerns with the politics of walking seem less evident. Comparing artistic and anthropological practices and discussions of walking, my final objective is to critically evaluate the concepts of ‘politics’ and ‘utopia’ in art and anthropology.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12976 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12976 The real life of utopian politics]]> 29 1

In June 2016, the anti‐establishment and grassroots‐democratic Five Star Movement (MoVimento Cinque Stelle, M5S) won local elections in Rome. Following fundamental opposition, supporters of the Movement now had to demonstrate their ability to govern and deliver on far‐reaching promises. This paper explores what happened when the utopian aspirations of the M5S – such as entangling the represented and their representatives in a permanent political dialogue, reshaping civic culture and harnessing new communication technologies for innovative types of participation – encountered political reality. I show that the divergent rhythms and tempos of political practice and bureaucratic reality soon split the more radical M5S supporters from the newly elected officials. Rather than realising utopian democratic behaviour, new technological possibilities and innovation in participation began to fracture the M5S.

In this paper, I propose an anthropological discussion of the correlation of utopia and optimism, in relation with ideas of personal and collective sacrifice. To do so, I will invoke my ethnographic research on political activism in Angola, particularly the so‐called Revolutionary Movement – a group of young activists challenging Angola’s authoritarian regime. During recent Luanda fieldwork, I observed how most of the ‘Revús’ engaged in self‐sacrificial behaviour, exposing themselves to police brutality, imprisonment and social discrimination, in their struggle towards a brighter collective future. This optimistic and somewhat Gandhian stance marks a dramatic departure from the sense of fatalism and ‘culture of fear’ that seems otherwise to prevail in Angola. I will question if and in what terms such stances are ‘utopian’ and configure ‘principles of hope’, as Ernst Bloch would put it. In the process, I will perform a critical interrogation of the correlation of utopia, hope and optimism.

Across the globe, we are seeing a popular shift of appeal from a liberal‐humanitarian imagination of the world, or even a communist‐socialist ideal, to one that is more conservative and often called ‘right‐wing populist’. In the ethnographic context analysed here, a utopian movement for revolutionary social change, led by Marx‐Lenin and Mao‐inspired Naxalite guerrillas, that once had a wide appeal in parts of India, is superseded by a more conservative utopian imagination of Hindutva forces. In exploring the Indian Maoist case, I suggest that dystopia is embedded within utopia. If those engaged in utopian social transformation seek to challenge prevailing ideology to transform people’s actions, it is equally possible for their utopian imagination to retreat into ritual that not only bears little relevance to most people but may also be potentially harmful and pave the way for other ideals to become prevalent. In analysing this Indian case, the paper suggests that we develop an anthropological theory of praxis, one that deals not only with how imaginations to change the world become realised in practice, but also accounts for multiple competing imaginations and how and why some become prevalent over others in daily life, in a dialectical process of reflection and action.

In war, the utopian and the dystopian converge. What could be more dystopian than a world of endless violence, and what more utopian than perpetual peace? Yet, at the same time, utopianism has itself been accused of brutality, and those who are opposed to war charged with perpetuating dystopian bloodshed. This paper examines the relationship between war, peace and utopia, by focusing on the ethical conflicts of opposing violence. It does so through the particular example of humanitarianism. Contemporary humanitarianism seeks to oppose the violence of war, but does so by placing limits on war rather than abolishing it, and is therefore often seen as complicit with violence. For many humanitarians, the response to this complicity has been a widespread sense of ethical crisis. In contrast, this paper examines a particular utopian humanitarian tradition, in the shape of British pacifist ambulance workers in the Second World War. This is a form of humanitarianism that recognises complicity, but also retains a utopian commitment to human perfection. The central argument of this paper is that the ethical conflicts of humanitarianism need to be put back into the diverse visions of the human that have run through humanitarian histories.

In this paper, I explore religious languages for political activism through values commonly given as reasons for becoming a unionist in Argentina. My interlocutors repeatedly emphasised their sense of vocation and service, as well as love, commitment and passion for the cause and for fellow activists or workers. Together, these related values comprise the sacred aspects of political activism, which is informed by a specific history of the blend between Peronism and Catholicism since the mid‐20th century.

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In the age of climate change, human life’s pliability is also re‐shaping anthropological debates. For debates centring on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human beings as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives interweave and imply a paradoxical human figure. On the one hand, they convey a being that simultaneously infuses, consumes and transmogrifies the world. Conversely, the human figure is forged by theoretical and analytical orientations that prescribe that one should abandon such a human‐centric reading of the world. The latter aspect is particularly evident in so‐called ‘resilience governance’ discourses. These discourses presuppose a form of becoming less through reinventing humanity and human life as more adaptable to post‐future horizons of always already collapsed ecologies. Critically tracing this paradox, this article probes the urban Anthropocene and its lesser humans as desirable under the aegis of ‘resilience governance’ in Mozambique, crucially also mapping and analysing the involvement of utopic registers in defiance of such developments.

This paper discusses practices of early marriage in protracted displacement, among Syrian refugees in Jordan, while drawing from ethnographic research with one extended family in Amman. The dominant form of early marriage is often glossed over as a common, traditional practice. The increase of early marriage among Syrians in Jordan is often explained as the result of a search for economic relief by the family. This article adds to this analysis by offering a new in‐depth reading of early marriage practices. It first shows how an emic differentiation is made between ordinary and ethically challenging forms of early marriage. Second, it aims to render visible additional dimensions of early marriage by showing how refugees actively shape their lives in the liminal state between waiting and home‐making. I argue that marriage can act as a normaliser and signify a desire for an ordinary family life that fulfils social and affective needs of home‐making in contexts of forced displacement.

Heritage politics can transform a dish, a cuisine or a meal into the emblem of a nation, a region or a community. A cultural and economic driver, culinary heritage has revealed the opportunities that actors can draw out of cultural essentialism, and the commercial exploitation that this can lead to. However, we know less about the consequences culinary heritage has in the lives of local communities and individuals concerned with it, in particular the most humble or vulnerable, nor the resulting modes of action – whether adoption, appropriation, rejection or indifference – it might provoke within and among these populations. This ethnographic study redresses this imbalance by giving voice to one of the symbols of current food politics in Mexico: indigenous female cooks. Their narratives evidence how practices of heritage deploy (food) cultures – and the people related to them – in programmatic, coercive fashions by building on notions and concepts of prospection, empowerment and audit culture. In villages, culinary heritage not only catalyses contradictions and tensions among women, which manifest in feelings of envy and injustice and decreased social cohesion; it also prompts changed opportunities that lead to resistance, new sociabilities and cooperation.

In this article, I focus on utopian social movements and how their members are increasingly seeking to exit from what I term, after Raymond Williams, a subjunctive grammar of transformation. Analysing a Marxist social movement in Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and placing my ethnography in dialogue with the conceptual philosophical framework of Henri Bergson, I argue that such movements have a special relationship with utopia, inscribing a contradiction that is characteristic to the mode of willed transformation: the very impossibility of distant objectives becomes the justification for striving ever harder in perpetual struggle; for the MST, programmes of movement massification and the maintenance of a unified front are the inevitable and necessary conditions to create a new society. This teleological impetus is normative and regulatory in character and is resolutely premised on a linear understanding of time. Recognising that the occupation of land is central to MST practice, I question how change might occur through a disaggregation of space and time; how the unexpected and unforeseen might arise despite mechanisms designed to engender continuity; how in each moment, there is the latent potential to inscribe – in a creative gesture – a future as yet uninscribed of meaning and being.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12993 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12993 Covid‐19 and the co‐development of climate activism]]> 29 1

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12995 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12995 A time for movement reflection?]]> 29 1

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13003 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13003 Anthropological mappings of generative politics]]> 29 1

In this introductory essay, we introduce the possibility of an anthropology of generative politics, focusing in particular on its utopian unfoldings. We depart from the recognition that the current global political landscape is exposing new forms of collective mobilisation that challenge prevailing understandings of ‘the human’, collective agency and chronotopical experiences. Through a critical review of anthropological and other scholarship on, for instance, (post)humanism, as well as a presentation of contemporary socio‐political configurations, we make the case for generative politics being integral to what we term ‘utopian confluences’.

In this contribution I examine the moral roots of the contemporary (in)hospitality of the city of Brussels by exploring one area of observation in particular: the handling of the fight against marriages of convenience for migratory purposes. Based on 2012–2013 ethnographic fieldwork, I reflect on the utopian thinking underlying the work of state agents in charge of implementing this fight. Through the detailed examination of two case studies, we will see how state agents select ‘good’ couples and, in doing so, reproduce social and racial hierarchies by excluding undesirable forms of intimate relationships. The non‐conformity with local moral standards (and particularly the romantic logic), modest ways of self‐presentation or the current ideology of migrants as parasites are at the core of these practices of exclusion.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.13006 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13006 Between moral ecology and global climate discourse]]> 29 1

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This paper examines how the Makushi Amerindians in Guyana use strategies of alliance in dealing with current threats associated with the Anthropocene that are linked to past engagements aimed at resisting slaving raids during the colonial era. The Makushi view logging and mining by outsiders as major sources of deforestation, which they see as a primary cause of ecological and climatic change. In the past and present, they have formed alliances and other relations of partnership with various outsiders – ranging from missionaries to eco‐tourists – to resist plantation‐derived and other extractive predations and excesses. These relations are rooted in shamanic ontologies and are central to Makushi engagements with outsiders during both the colonial and neoliberal eras. Combining ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, this paper will elucidate the past and present contexts of these relations and show how continuities can contribute to further conceptualising the Plantationocene as an alternative framework concerned with understanding the ecological and climatic changes of the Anthropocene. It incorporates the notions of alliance and resistance into the Plantationocene framework.

Climate change mitigation pilot projects (REDD+ – Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) affect and interact with the local population in Central Kalimantan and many other parts of Indonesia. Rather than being politically and economically neutral activities, climate change mitigation projects tend to objectify the value of carbon, land and labour, contributing to a process of commodification of nature and social relations. In this specific case study, a set of values – equality and autonomy – central to the Ngaju people, the indigenous population in Central Kalimantan, become contested in the course of the climate change mitigation project. These central values are produced in everyday activities that include mobility and the productive base – subsistence and market‐based production – among the Ngaju people. On the other hand, the climate change mitigation project‐related environmental practices and actions produce values that point to individual (material) benefit and stratification of the society. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to and create understanding of value production and related tensions in the efforts to ‘fix’ environmental degradation problems through the climate change mitigation pilot project in Central Kalimantan.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12927 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12927 Brokerage and transnational governance in aid partnerships]]> 28 4

Drawing on a semi‐autoethnography of a development project in northern Ethiopia, this article engages the role and power of indicators in the development sector. It both demonstrates and questions the power usually ascribed indicators when seen as an authoritative bureaucratic tool, while also showing how actors – and I was one of them – at various levels of the aid chain merely perform compliance with the indicators as a way to manage new and externally imposed demands. As the indicators ‘travel’ from the top, through the aid chain’s multiple nodes, to the level of beneficiaries, they convey policy priorities top‐down, but are seemingly complied with bottom‐up, demonstrating both their formative power and the scope for brokerage and manipulation of externally imposed policies. Interestingly, this form of brokerage and reactivity from below are also enabled and orchestrated by the top, i.e. by the same actors who conveyed the indicators, to maintain and reproduce aid relations.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12949 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12949 Problems and contradictions in macro‐level neoliberal theories and their translation to micro‐level business innovation strategies]]> 28 4

This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal assumptions about how large‐scale markets should be organised to maximise their efficiency now inform assumptions about how small‐scale business firms should be organised to maximise their innovative potential. A key mediating concept between macro‐level neoliberal theories and micro‐level innovation strategies is ‘free information flow’. This concept emerged in the mid‐20th century in the context of military‐industrial and engineering efforts to develop a mathematical theory of communication. Because this concept does not align with the embodied and meaning‐making nature of human employees, attempts to translate macro‐level neoliberal theories to micro‐level business innovation strategies have run into difficulties. These difficulties expose a problem that is intrinsic to neoliberal theories themselves. On the one hand, neoliberal theories emphasise the importance of each economic player’s context‐specific knowledge for an efficient economic order. On the other hand, they rely on a notion of context that is inflected by a pre‐determined goal, i.e. maximising economic efficiency, in relation to which people become epiphenomenal. This notion has very little to do with the lived reality of context as an emergent and indeterminate outcome of people’s everyday activities and interactions.

This paper explores the need to understand the cultural aspects of the production of space and the use of communications technologies in the Chinatown area of Milan, Italy, centred on Via Paolo Sarpi just to the northeast of the city centre. I argue that although we can understand some aspects of this space and Chinese migrants’ production of it in terms of the history of Chinese, largely Wenzhounese, migration with its associated social and economic models and practices, in order to understand the dynamic negotiation of space in the restrictively controlled Via Paolo Sarpi we need also to incorporate the cultural use of contemporary communications technologies – smartphones in particular – into that understanding.

Goût biologique et labour dans les plantations de thé indiennes Cet article adopte une perspective multi‐espèces sur le goût pour explorer comment l’agriculture biologique affecte à la fois les relations non humaines et le travail humain dans les plantations de thé indiennes. Les planteurs de thé biologique utilisent le goût pour évaluer les conditions du sol et les changements climatiques et pour appliquer des pratiques biologiques en conséquence. L’article soutient que, d’une part, les planteurs cultivent stratégiquement des formes de collaboration entre les théiers, les champignons, les vaches et les micro‐organismes du sol pour améliorer le goût des cultures en monoculture. D’autre part, puisque ces formes de collaboration requièrent et reproduisent le travail précaire des travailleurs et des superviseurs du thé, leur résistance aux pratiques biologiques affecte également les goûts. Le terroir du thé biologique se caractérise à la fois par l’unité des espèces dans les monocultures et par les inégalités du travail dans les plantations.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12957 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12957 Colombian ‘kidnap radio’ and the sound of God]]> 28 4

Some hostages of the FARC held in the Colombian Amazon spoke of how they believed a certain radio voice could result in an action. For over 20 years, every Saturday night a radio programme broadcast messages from the hostages’ families and loved ones. A small number of these captives recycled the prophetic radio voice in a dialogic interaction with prayer in their inner speech, and this resulted in what they believed to be the voice of God. By assigning them new identities, the hostages were through a process of performative listening ‘doing things’ with voices in the Austinian sense. This article takes Austin’s work in a new direction by exploring the primary performative function of voice. By analysing localised ideologies of voice through the complex discourse of prisoners’ reflexive self‐analyses, it adds the dimension of vocality to speech act theory. Research with Colombian hostages shows that inner voice can be used to invoke linguistic representations of God in the absence of any tuition.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12961 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12961 Calibrating ideals and realities in a state‐socialist system for food provision]]> 28 4

Based on our collective ethnography of Cuba’s socialist system for the provision of state‐subsidised food, this article explores manners in which the state weaves itself into the fabric of people’s everyday lives in state‐socialist society. Instituted by Cuba’s revolutionary government in the early 1960s, Cuba’s ‘state system for provisioning’ is still today the backbone of household subsistence, propelling individuals into direct daily relations with the state via its neighbourhood‐level network of stores that distribute food catering to citizens’ ‘basic needs’. Our ethnography brings together a series of studies conducted by the members of our team in different parts of Havana, charting the most salient aspects of people’s interaction with the state in this alimentary context. We argue that the state becomes pervasive in people’s daily lives not just because it is present in so much of it, but also as the basic normative premise on which people interpret and evaluate everyday comportments in the interactions food provisioning involves. Life in state socialism involves the constant and intricate comparison of its own realities against the normative ideals the state purports to institute. These ‘vernacular comparisons’ between life and state, as we call them, are the ‘local knowledge’ of state socialism in Cuba.

In this article I examine the work of home visiting volunteers as an expression of state intervention. I draw on my experience as an ethnographer based at an NGO office in South Manchester. I show how the state is made manifest in the mundane and quotidian practices of volunteering, parenting and ‘helping out’. I argue that volunteering operates as a governing technology promoting values such as self‐regulation, self‐help, independence and decision‐making as elements key to the right kind of citizen. The state conceals itself and its modes of operation through volunteering, but in the process it is also diluted. In this case, it relies on ideas of self‐development and self‐improvement, but people go further in exploiting governing technologies for their own purposes. It not only concerns (self‐)discipline but also maternal and gendered practices, social policy and different kinds of knowledges. The distinction between ‘indigenous’ or local knowledge and ‘expert’ or professional knowledge is key. Volunteering becomes a visible form of indigenous or local knowledge promoting the self‐regulation of women’s capacities and in doing so acts as a concealed expression of the state.

By analysing how shamanist nomads who previously opposed large infrastructure works have suddenly become enchanted by the prospect of the construction of a large gas pipeline, this paper ethnographically investigates how technology and infrastructure become perceived as promising by ordinary people on the ground in post‐Soviet Siberia. Drawing attention to the discursive impact of large gas corporations and the role of deeply embedded Soviet conceptions of modernity in filling pipelines with cultural meaning, this paper provides unique insights into the highly localised engagements with infrastructure. As such, this paper contributes to the anthropology of Russia, where infrastructure has only recently received academic attention. It also corresponds to the ‘infrastructural turn’ in anthropology by studying the social, cultural and material conditions ensuring that infrastructure becomes perceived as promising. Furthermore, this paper explores the significant impact of ancillary infrastructures connected to a construction project in entangling people with technology and infrastructure.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses the recent phenomenon of the mass search for Russian citizenship by Tajikistani nationals and critically engages with the emerging concept of strategic citizenship. Bringing together the literature on strategic citizenship and affective documents, it argues that the notion of strategy is incomplete and can be misleading when used to analyse citizenship seeking. Drawing an opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ aspects of citizenship, there is a danger in looking at strategising through the assumptions grounded in formal rationality placing a rational individual seeking to ‘maximise utility’ through their citizenship choices at the centre of analysis. My ethnography shows that grounded in the local systems of value, practices of citizenship‐seeking go far beyond the calculative logic of cost–benefit analysis and should be theorised in the context of family projects and subsequent ideas about social becoming. It also shows that acts of taking citizenship emerge as affective responses of people trying to figure out what is the ‘rational’ thing to do in the context of uncertainty and instability of labour markets, mobility regulations and documentary regimes, affects being distributed not only in persons and their relations but in and around documents.

The reliance of welfare recipients on the state is classically demonised as a relation of dependency: one that foments passivity on the part of claimants. Critical voices in austerity Britain have drawn attention to government efforts to reconfigure that relationship, by ‘reforming’ welfare, remaking the grantee as a repaying loan‐taker and turning dependents into responsible, autonomous citizens. This paper, based on research in the debt advice sector in England, shows that dependency may involve unexpected directionalities of reliance. (Those who appear as state dependents in one register can be those depended upon in another.) It focuses in particular on encounters with migrants, describing what the process of ‘transnational householding’ tells us about dependency. It discusses the relations between advisers and clients, showing how advice charities create a parallel system of care and support. A punitive and debt‐based welfare system means that many clients owe money to the state as well as to commercial creditors. Austerity and welfare reform are rendering individuals’ obligations to family members and others fragile and insecure. But given advisers’ intervention between a hostile bureaucracy and debtors, the experience of reckoning, owing money and settling accounts can end up as something more akin to householding than to controlling discipline.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12783 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12783 Movement, rhythm and perception in an Italian national park]]> 28 3

Drawing on the concept of taskscape, the paper explores activities of environmental interpretation in an Italian national park. Taskscape is the array of rhythmic movements, tasks and activities that humans and nonhumans perform in the process of dwelling. Accordingly, the paper presents environmental interpretation as particular mode of action and perception that shapes conservation areas as environments understood as realms of nature. By extending the concept of taskscape, and adopting a performative perspective, the paper also sheds light on ethical and cognitive considerations. Ethics emerges along with the activities interpreters carry out within the landscape; it is performed, hence it is constitutive of a taskscape of conservation as a process in which particular ways of moving, hence perceiving, generate particular ways of knowing, hence understanding, and vice versa. The conclusion suggests that nature in conservation areas emerges as a constellation of activities resulting from a particular way of dwelling and performing a certain environment according to a specific rhythm, and framed within a particular ethics.

In this paper, I discuss the reactions to European wild boars () in the Brazilian–Uruguayan border region from an ethnographic point of view. Drawing on the concept of taskscape, I explore the reasons why these animals are regarded as ‘bandits’ by local agents, as well as the differences in perception between the threat posed by boars and by other non‐native species also present in the Pampa biome, such as Australian eucalyptus ( sp.), Pinus ( sp) and South‐African tough lovegrass (). By contrasting scientific and local views of ‘invasive species’, I argue that the reactions to are connected to the transformations that the Pampa landscape has been undergoing throughout its socio‐environmental history. Namely, the deeply agonistic pattern of human–animal relations that constituted the prairie, as well as the tensions concerning the relations of property and labour in rural areas. Furthermore, in line with the approach that sees landscapes as shaped by different ‘tasks’, I explore local notions of ‘work’ in order to offer an alternative interpretation for the problem of biological invasions, beyond the territorial approach that permeates the literature on the subject.

This paper addresses the joint becoming of landscapes, agricultural tasks and prairie rodents in the French Jura uplands, where the development of hay monoculture triggered outbreaks of water voles that reduce pastures to dust. I explore links between processual landscape anthropology and contemporary scholarship on more‐than‐human entanglements in order to follow how ecological disruptions called for the development of new arts of noticing towards multispecies life. I first describe the relationships between Jura farmers, voles, fields and agricultural modernisation programmes, and suggest that vole outbreaks bring these together around shared tasks. I then consider how disputes over how to control voles led to changes in farmers’ ways of caring for their cows and tending the fields. I argue that these underlined changes in their ways of understanding and responding to the rhythms of the landscape’s more‐than‐human activities. Finally, I draw on the example of conflicts between farmers over whether cows or pastures should be more central to their work. I make the case that to be attentive to fields as a landscape in the Jura is ultimately to define the (in)appropriateness of certain actions and tasks. It becomes constitutive of what ‘good farming’ should be, and precipitates new identities.

In his 1993 essay ‘The temporality of the landscape’, Tim Ingold argued that landscape develops through processes of temporality, that is time as it emerges in the unfolding of life through action. This association between temporality and landscape was expressed by the term ‘taskscape’ In our introduction to this section, we return to the concept of taskscape to assess its usefulness in light of a number of developments in the understanding of human–environment relations. These include the changing conceptualisation of ‘landscape’ and the emergence of new approaches for understanding relations across species. We explain the ways that the three authors in this section use taskscape to think through political tensions and to explore how landscapes are achieved through inter‐relating actions of humans and other beings. We conclude by emphasising the heuristic value of taskscape as a means of thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene. Both taskscape and Anthropocene are concepts that draw together human history and the shaping of the world and, as such, the taskscape offers a novel means to explore and understand the dynamics of Anthropocene environmental relations.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12914 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12914 Abortion rights and democracy today]]> 28 3

In 2018, the Irish public voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which since 1983 banned abortion in the country. While this was a watershed moment in Irish history, it was not unconnected to wider discussions now taking place around the world concerning gender, reproductive rights, the future of religion, Church–State relationships, democracy and social movements. With this Forum, we want to prompt some anthropological interpretations of Ireland's repeal of the Eighth Amendment as a matter concerning not only reproductive rights, but also questions of life and death, faith and shame, women and men, state power and individual liberty, and more. We also ask what this event might mean (if anything) for other societies dealing with similar issues?

This article aims to place dependency into a conversation with its opposite, sovereignty. It does so by proposing that the two concepts work dialectically, thereby casting doubt on the ideal type of sovereignty that predominates in political theory. Relying on examples from 19th‐century debtors’ prisons and 21st‐century offshore havens, the article argues that complete sovereignty is a powerful and driving myth that must be continually contested, recognising instead that all modes of sovereignty entail simultaneous modes of dependency. Ethnographic and historical evidence can help us to chart these complex links of sovereignty and dependency, rather than elevate the former and be suspicious of the latter.

This paper explores some accusations of wrongdoing in Papua New Guinea in the early 2000s. These accusations illustrate an ambiguous encouragement and discouragement of different kinds of perceived dependence as Papua New Guineans struggled with a growing disenchantment with their nation‐state and the withdrawal rather than expansion of state services and assistance. The paper explores the dynamics by which these accusations brought particular dependencies, cast as legitimate and illegitimate, in and out of view, and compares these with other instances in other parts of the world. Ascriptions of ‘dependence’ are shown not only to shift with context but also to be highly performative, being a central means by which persons engaged in highly entangled interdependent relations attempt to re‐shape the nature of those entanglements.

Critical studies of development in the global South have called attention to the failure of existing modernisation projects to deliver on promises of full employment in well‐remunerated wage labour. Despite this shortfall in formal employment, non‐normative labour forms have proliferated globally, alongside mass expansion of financial markets since the late 20th century. In the present article, I take up these multiple trends as interrelated phenomena, inquiring into the work of finance in the extraction of value where individuals labour outside of formal employment. The argument, in brief, is that manifold debt relations have facilitated an effective extraction of value from non‐normative forms of capitalist labour in the informal economy. This argument contrasts with positions that see informal labour as non‐capitalist, or posit such labour as lying outside class relations of exploitation. Ethnographically, I engage these issues through a study of heterogeneous livelihoods among residents of a squatter settlement located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Myanmar’s former capital, Yangon.

As a response to the reintroduction of border controls at the French/Italian border, which aim to push back undesired migrants, increasing border‐crossing facilitation practices are being carried out by different categories of social actors, including local residents and migrants themselves. In a context of increasing criminalisation of border‐crossing facilitation practices, racialised, non‐white facilitators are usually stigmatised as smugglers acting exclusively in return for payment, while local residents moved by humanitarian concerns are increasingly represented as privileged do‐gooders. This article moves toward a deconstruction of both categories by investigating the discursive motivations of different border‐crossing facilitators and taking into account the unequal structure of opportunities characterising their practices. Through ethnographic accounts and interviews in different localities at the French/Italian border, the article sheds light on the complex coexistence of different interests moving a wide range of actors. The empirical analysis reveals that mere market logics do not reflect the complexity of the figure of the professional facilitator; nor are humanitarian, ethical and political motivations exclusive to white, European citizens providing free help to migrants in distress.

Anxieties around the moral effects of states of ‘dependence’ remain central to political and social debate across the world. At a time when the association between wage‐labour and a particular valorised conception of adult male independence is increasingly hard to sustain, these contests can take on new forms and new levels of intensity. Anthropology has a potentially valuable contribution to make to these discussions, having long made descriptions of particular forms of ‘dependence’ central to many of its most distinctive analytic framings. Nonetheless, the concept of ‘dependence’ itself has rarely been explicitly theorised in anthropological theory, as opposed to other concepts with which it has often been theoretically entwined, such as ‘exchange’, ‘reciprocity’ or ‘debt’, which have been subjected to more concerted theoretical investigation. The papers in this collection provide a series of comparative ethnographic explorations of the role of dependence in shaping new forms of sociality across the globe, as a contribution to the development of an anthropological understanding of the continued evolution of the term’s meaning and effect in the 21st century.

Recent anthropological studies of Italy have presented vivid and compelling accounts of the anxieties about precarity and economic dependence that have emerged as both state protections of employment and social welfare provisions have weakened. This essay, in contrast, argues that for a substantial sector of the Italian populace, work relations have been governed less by a state‐regulated regime of labour than by kinship ideologies and relations. Since the beginning of industrial manufacturing in the mid‐19th century and continuing into the 21st century, family firms have been the dominant employer in Italy. By following the changes in the silk industry and its allied clothing manufacturing sector in the 25 years from 1985 to 2010, this essay shows how aspirations and ascriptions of economic independence and dependence among firm owners, their children and hired managers are shaped by kinship relations and class trajectories.

This article proposes a movement between two sorts of dependency in the secretive bonds of violent men. The first forges an interdependent set of relations between mafia men, independent of the state; the second arises as a dependency of these former on the state in order to break the interdependencies that formerly made them as mafia men. In this ethnographic and oral history narrative, we first witness a dyadic, homosocial relation between two violent men that forges a masculinised interdependence binding the protagonists of this story together as they share a secret. We then encounter the break‐up of this interdependency amid local moral outrage over betrayal and violence, and its substitution by a strong dependence on the state. Through a microsociology that delves into a history of relations, the article thus shows how the subjects of this story shift from one set of dependencies to another. The essay critically revisits discussions of dependency, especially on the state, underscoring the missing element of dependency in the making and breaking of bonds in a secretive male brotherhood.

This article provides an overview of the main European social anthropology journals during 2019. It uses the concept of Exquisite Corpses, a technique devised by the Surrealists, an avant‐garde art group of the early 20th century, to suggest a practice of transmitting knowledge across periods of fracture. It argues that this process characterises the way that some aspects of social anthropology’s canon continue to be transmitted and remain influential, despite having been superseded by time, fashion and changes in social and academic attitudes. A wide range of scholarship is highlighted. Topics focused on include time, relations, borders, bureaucracy, ethics, and the challenges faced by academics in general and anthropologists in particular. These challenges are driven by the emergence of an authoritarian spirit across a number of fields in Europe and beyond, continuing austerity following on from the economic crisis, and the consolidation of an audit culture that drives the university in an ever more neoliberal direction. Despite the current rigorous climate, European social anthropology continues to be vital and relevant.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12765 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12765 Muslim–Christian marriage and gender in southwest Nigeria]]> 28 2

This article explores religious coexistence among the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria. It focuses on interfaith marriages, frequent especially between Muslim men and Christian women, as a practice that brings Islam and Christianity into a mutually productive relationship. The article explores the tension between the general understanding that interfaith marriage is a positive anchor of Muslim–Christian relations and the widespread individual scepticism towards such marriages. Rooted in distinct discourses, Muslim and Christian attitudes to interfaith marriage have undergone changes along different trajectories since the 1980s. At the same time, they share a ‘family resemblance’ because members of both religions emphasise the importance of marriage and its unequally gendered nature. The unequal and asymmetric relationships between the two religions constitute part of a wider religious field, where the shared belief in the importance of conjugality is central to the gendered social order. Thus, even though Muslim–Christian marriages are often understood as problematic, they are still seen as less problematic than the failure to marry.

In this commentary, I argue that we need to expose the multiple layers of historical thinking about the production of the category of religion that play into both our scholarly thinking and the way religion is lived, understood and fought for in the lives of our informants. We can no more take the contours (or limits) of any particular religion for granted, or as self‐evident, than we can take the category of religion, named as such, as a natural human phenomenon that is somehow free from the domain of culture.

Drawing on research about settings in South India and West Africa characterised by significant religious diversity, we reflect on the ways in which everyday religiosity among contemporary Muslims is constituted through difference and contestation. Our cases are from two ostensibly secular states – India and Nigeria – both former British colonies where secularism has been interrogated over the past few decades. In our focus on what we call ‘lived’ Islam, we pay attention not only to intra‐Muslim differences but also to how religiosity is formed and experienced through engagement and encounters with Others, whether religious, ethnic or political, both locally and globally. Everyday religiosity in such settings as South India and Nigeria emerges at the interstices of such encounters where Muslims often seek to draw boundaries at the same time as they fashion themselves – in lifestyle, sociality, aesthetics – in relation to various Others. As we argue, such ethnographic cases with their comparative angle underscore the importance of studying religiosity in heterogeneous settings so as to explode the flawed, idealised sense of wholeness that emerges in some of the literature on the anthropology of one religious tradition or another with such traditions sometimes represented as deriving from self‐contained theologies.

This article focuses on the Kyangyang (‘the shadows’ or ‘the shades’), a prophetic movement that emerged in Guinea‐Bissau in 1984, in which ‘animistic’ Balanta farmers‐and‐herders learned to pray as Muslims and Christians do. We want to propose that (a) more attention needs to be paid to religious movements that bridge the polarisation between Islam and Christianity in West Africa and (b) a broader focus on the overall pluralistic setting is necessary in order to understand the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a particular religion. We want to propose, too, that some religions glossed as mimetic (such as Kyangyang) are not as ‘secondary’, in relation to a putative primary source (Islam or Christianity being the model to be copied), as we may intuitively assume at first sight. Copying is part and parcel of human action and transformation but, paradoxical as it may sound, it may not be as opposed to originality as we tend to think. By looking at how Kyangyang works, how imagination is put to play by prophets in order to make Balanta farmers ‘move forward’ towards a potential ‘new world’, we may be getting at the very heart of what it means to be original, at least in terms of religious creativity.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.

Kenyan Pentecostals attempt to ‘live as Londoners do’ without compromising their devotion to God. Doing so necessitates coexisting with religious and non‐religious others, including Muslims who they view simultaneously as a ‘threat’ to historically Christian Britain and an ‘example’ to emulate. While the anthropologies of Christianity and Islam have developed as separate sub‐fields, pluralist settings like East London demand attention to inter‐religious coexistence. To understand these born‐again Christians’ subjectivities and lives, I draw on existential anthropology to explore how they navigate the circumstances in which they find themselves. I argue that Pentecostalism offers them the means to live as ‘good’ Christians, allowing them to seek material success and salvation in such a setting. More broadly, I suggest that an existential anthropological lens is well suited for studying pluralist contexts where relational encounters between diverse people and ideas are inevitable.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12772 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12772 Women’s relatedness and casual pleasures in village Tamil Nadu]]> 28 2

This paper is about pleasure, specifically the pleasure that women take in kinship. Contrary to its diminished importance within the discipline, kinship still resonates strongly for many of our interlocutors. Why is kinship so captivating? Kinship’s continued significance, I argue, is attributable not so much to its utility or morality but to the pleasure it evokes. In capturing the major implications of kinship, anthropologists have barely considered the small joys of living together with kin. Pleasure is understood in two terms. First, the experiential, where it is incidental to routine work and ritual obligations but is also deliberately sought and actively indulged in. Second, the aesthetic, where thinking abstractly and constructing genealogies are not simply anthropologists illusions, which is itself a form of pleasure for our interlocutors. Focusing on pleasure does not detract from structural constraints and customary suffering but textures everyday experiences of kinship. Offering another category to think with and opportunities to rethink extant ones, pleasure forces us to confront kinship’s open‐ended and improvisational qualities. While kinship’s consequence has been well scrutinised, privileging pleasure allows us to grapple with the insouciance with which kinship is also lived, felt and becomes taken for granted.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12779 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12779 Crossing religious and ethnographic boundaries – the case for comparative reflection]]> 28 2

This introduction to the special issue traces the development history of the sub‐disciplines of the anthropologies of Christianity and Islam to suggest that these ‘monistic’ tendencies have obscured exploration and theorisation of inter‐religious coexistence and encounters for people’s lives and the societies in which they live. These sub‐disciplinary boundaries have further led to an unintended ‘provincialisation’ of both geographical spaces and theoretical debates, and stalled the development of a theoretically robust anthropology of religion. This special issue argues for the value of comparative work on multi‐religious encounters within particular contexts, as well as of thinking comparatively on a global scale, as a way to generate new questions and considerations in how we study religion. The final section offers a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12788 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12788 Densities of state from the perspective of a Montenegrin village]]> 28 2

In this paper I argue that the state is best imagined through the metaphor of a liquid crystal – a substance that, at the same time, is both structured and fluid. I combine several well‐established views on the state (as an entity that has structure, but that also needs movement), and demonstrate that the state comes into being not only through vertical (and hence hierarchical) activities, but also through multiple other attempts to build transparency and predictability. A three‐dimensional liquid crystal can be used as a model of the state that not only has structures shaped by multiple participants, but that also is partly an illusion where various centres only appear to group in a meaningful way. In the second half of the paper, I illustrate this liquid crystal metaphor of the state by using an ethnographic snapshot of Njeguši, a small village in Montenegro. Variously (un)successful attempts of villagers and other actors to shape the new road show how the liquid crystal areas are being initiated, sustained and interpreted, thus contributing to the shape the state is brought into being.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12795 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12795 Religious and scientific conflicts during the COVID‐19 crisis in Brazil]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12797 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12797 Two comments on the language of warfare]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12800 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12800 A small‐scale narrative]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12801 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12801 Reflections on the COVID‐19 pandemic in the Philippines]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12802 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12802 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12803 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12803 What if a gender approach had been applied to inform public health measures to fight the COVID‐19 pandemic?]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12805 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12805 Ethnography of the public controversy about vaccination in the time of COVID‐19]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12806 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12806 Toward an ‘after’ COVID‐19]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12808 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12808 New forms of mytho‐praxis in the age of COVID‐19]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12810 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12810 On living and being alive in lockdown]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12814 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12814 Volunteer labour and crisis loans in Norway]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12815 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12815 A collated auto‐ethnographic response by young people (dis)orientated in strange times]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12817 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12817 ad hoc local epistemologies and social life in crisis]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12820 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12820 India’s migrant workers between bare life and political existence]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12821 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12821 Puerto Rico confronts COVID‐19 under US colonialism]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12826 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12826 An international conspiracy ‘language’ for the new reality?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12827 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12827 COVID‐19 and the politics of life]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12828 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12828 Social supports during COVID‐19]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12834 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12834 Lessons from Xinjiang]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12835 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12835 A few intercultural metaphors]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12836 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12836 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12837 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12837 Memories of the cholera epidemic]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12838 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12838 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12839 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12839 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12840 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12840 Tracing alimentary xenophobia in the time of COVID‐19]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12841 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12841 A call for urgent anthropological attention]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12842 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12842 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12843 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12843 A pandemic comedy?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12844 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12844 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12845 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12845 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12846 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12846 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12847 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12847 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12848 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12848 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12849 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12849 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12850 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12850 Notes from rural Australia]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12851 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12851 (post)humanist perspective in corona times]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12852 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12852 A tale of risk selection in the COVID‐19 pandemic]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12853 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12853 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12854 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12854 The future after COVID‐19?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12855 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12855 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12856 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12856 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12857 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12857 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12858 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12858 Face masks beyond COVID‐19]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12859 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12859 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12860 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12860 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12861 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12861 Bulgaria and the COVID‐19 crisis]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12862 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12862 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12863 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12863 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12864 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12864 Thoughts from Poland]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12865 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12865 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12866 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12866 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12867 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12867 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12868 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12868 China and the USA]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12869 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12869 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12870 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12870 The story of incertitude]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12871 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12871 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12872 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12872 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12873 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12873 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12874 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12874 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12875 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12875 Indigenous peoples in Mexico]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12876 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12876 Thinking biopolitics]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12877 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12877 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12878 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12878 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12879 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12879 COVID‐19 urgent anthropological reflections]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12880 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12880 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12881 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12881 Coexistence or extinction of SARS‐CoV‐2?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12882 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12882 Creating new frontiers within public and private space]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12883 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12883 Notes on Northern Italy]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12884 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12884 STS potential of online research]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12885 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12885 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12886 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12886 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12887 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12887 Solidarity, resilience and coping with the measures against COVID‐19]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12888 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12888 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12889 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12889 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12890 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12890 What is the disaster?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12891 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12891 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12892 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12892 Reversing values of solidarity in Italy]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12893 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12893 Notes on temporalities of COVID‐19]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12894 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12894 Who cares about that waste?]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12895 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12895 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12896 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12896 ]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12899 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12899 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12900 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12900 Claims‐making about the origin of a new virus]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12901 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12901 Urgent anthropological COVID‐19 forum]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12902 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12902 ]]> 28 2

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12903 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12903 ]]> 28 2

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12661 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12661 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12723 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12723 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12726 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12726 ]]> 28 1

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12728 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12728 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12729 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12729 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12730 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12730 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12731 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12731 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12732 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12732 Notes towards an anthropological biography]]> 28 1

Anthropological work that focuses on individual lives, what Zeitlyn calls a ‘sample of one’ (Zeitlyn, 2008, , 16, 154), has long hovered on the edge of disciplinary respectability. At best it is viewed as a fieldwork methodology, a way of collecting data; at worst, a kind of popularisation. This essay is a response to an emerging interest in anthropological biography. Drawing on the rich history of innovative work with individuals, it presents an argument for taking seriously ‘person‐centered ethnography’ (Langness and Frank 1981). Through a juxtaposition of classic texts and films, the paper articulates a case for recognising person‐centred ethnography as an unusually generative anthropological form, offering a critical context for the development of contemporary practice. Finally, in seeking to distinguish what might constitute anthropological biography as a particular mode of inquiry, I propose a realignment of the life‐writing project with humanistically oriented work in biographical studies.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12734 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12734 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12735 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12735 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12736 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12736 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12737 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12737 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12738 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12738 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12739 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12739 Law, vulnerability and frustration at the UN Human Rights Committee]]> 28 1

In the 1940s activists lobbied for the creation of a binding international bill of rights backed up by an international human rights court as the backbone of the post‐World War II order. Together, so the activists believed, these would guarantee peace and harmony to all mankind. Seven decades later this vision has been transformed into a cluster of UN human rights treaties and expert committees known as treaty bodies to monitor them. In practice treaty bodies process documents in ongoing bureaucratic cycles, which are located somewhere between an audit ritual and a court session. This duality is a source of strength as well as vulnerability and frustration, embodying an endless navigation between the ‘utopia’ of a robust and binding legal framework and an ‘apology’ for actual state conduct. This paper explores how this duality manifests itself in the practices of the most authoritative and ‘court‐like’ treaty body of the UN, namely the Human Rights Committee monitoring state compliance over the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), simultaneously exploring how the vision is kept alive.

This paper focuses on the ambivalent effects of the sudden human rights activism inflation and civil society development in Turkey between 2007 and 2011 – a period of provisional liberalisation of the socio‐political sphere that was accompanied by the professionalisation of the bureaucratic realm. I argue that contrary to the recent critical literature on such rights, which contends that liberalisation and bureaucratisation of human rights rhetoric have led to its de‐politicisation and de‐radicalisation in the post‐Cold War period, the particular political path of human rights in Turkey produced less streamlined, more complex results. While their transformation from a stigmatised rhetoric of radical opposition to a celebrated instrument for good governance has introduced parallel human rights initiatives and the emergence of an alternative interpretation of human rights in the official governmental realm, this did not lead to eliminating radical political interpretations. A careful examination of Turkey’s human rights circles reveals that (despite attempts to consolidate these rights as politically neutral, which fall within a single field and encourage a liberal vision of governance) the period under review is rather characterised by both an intensification of the discussions and negotiations between the many actors involved as well as by their confrontation.

This paper investigates the bureaucratisation of the (utopian) ideal of community participation in Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) safeguarding and management. The analysis considers the whole ‘policy life’ of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. Our ethnographic examples from UNESCO, Brazil, China and Greece illustrate how bureaucratic operations often disenchant the participatory ideal, alienating it from its original intention. At the same time, driven by their commitment to ‘good’ governance and informed by sentiments of frustration and disappointment with actual policy results, vocational bureaucrats at different administrative levels experiment with and conceive of new tools in order to produce evidence of participation. We demonstrate how this bureaucratic creativity has concrete consequences, which may differ from the intended utopia, but nevertheless bring to life particular interpretations of the participatory principle among the recipients for whom heritage policies were originally designed. Thus, we present a more nuanced picture of bureaucratisation in which officials’ emotions and engagement sustain their agency against structural constraints as well as the futility and fragility of administrative procedures.

Much has been made of the Agambenian framework of exception and the regime of legal suspension it establishes. This paper ethnographically examines the hard work that is required to produce legal suspension within the parameters of the law by looking at the practice of property restitution of transitional institutions in post‐war Kosovo. Kosovo’s ‘black hole state’ reveals how the legal bureaucracies established to usher in human rights serve to perpetuate the state of suspension rather than realising their utopian goals.

The mandate of the ICRC as granted by the Geneva Conventions is to act as a ‘guardian of International Humanitarian Law’ on the frontlines of conflicts. While its humanitarian relief operations have contributed to its international reputation, this monitoring function is rather unknown to the public. In this paper, I pay specific attention to activities carried out by ICRC delegates to protect various categories of victims in times of war. By focusing on the ways in which delegates interpret the principles (‘neutrality’, ‘impartiality’, ‘confidentiality’) that guide their actions, I seek to decipher the organisation’s ethos and worldview. I highlight the hopes as well as the frustrations and disappointments generated by myriad administrative techniques devised to engage parties to a conflict in a ‘confidential dialogue’ on the conduct of hostilities. Finally, I examine how these techniques, built on the hope in the possibility of communication, are changing as a result of external sources of pressure for ‘evidence‐based programming’, turning personalised case‐based monitoring into a new form of ‘audit culture’ based on statistical evidence. Paradoxically, relying on numbers to realise the utopia of ‘humanising war’ makes the very ‘humans’ who are supposed to benefit from it disappear from view.

Three decades before the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the international community – in its newly institutionalised guise as a League of Nations – was charged by its covenant to guarantee the rights and protections of a more limited number of people: those considered to be ‘persons belonging to minorities of race, religion or language’ in certain primarily east European states. The everyday work of ‘supervising’ the minorities treaties was carried out by newly recruited members of an entirely unprecedented genre of administration: an international civil service whose role was to support the League of Nations in all its various activities. This paper draws on unpublished interviews from 1965 and 1966, archival documents and first‐person retrospective accounts in which international civil servants describe and reflect on their work on minorities treaty supervision in the new international institution widely seen as an ‘experiment’. Focusing on the accounts of one important figure, the Spaniard Pablo de Azcárate (who served in the Administrative Commissions and Minorities Questions Section of the League of Nations Secretariat from 1922 to 1933), it explores the ethos, aspirations, frustrations and working practices of international civil servants in an institution still in formation and not yet fully bureaucratised.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12746 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12746 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12747 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12747 ]]> 28 1

This paper examines the spiritual kinship known in Italian as ‘godparenthood’, as it is practised among families originating from specific rural areas of Calabria, southern Italy, who live in Adelaide, South Australia. In the Catholic rite of baptism, the (godparent) is a person who promises to share the responsibility of the child’s education with the parents. For the participants of the present study, however, the relationship among (godparents) is much more than that, perhaps being better translated as ‘family allies’. is a strong relationship that involves not merely the people directly concerned in the religious ceremony, but all members of the two families, leading to the creation of an extended and fictive family, or alliances across multiple families. The paper shows that such inter‐familial cooperation among migrants and their descendants appears to be highly visible among Italians originating from Calabria. Yet it questions why godparenthood ties are even present in a community of Calabrian‐Italian‐Australians. I draw on folklore and network theories particularly, and the Bourdieusian concept of social capital is especially crucial in interpreting the ties of family alliances that exist in the Calabrian diasporic community of Adelaide.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12750 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12750 Ethics, affects and subjectivities in international governance processes]]> 28 1

Bureaucracies, whether national or international, have rarely been conceived as ‘utopian’ sites. On the contrary, classic representations tend to describe bureaucratic formations as ‘rationality machines’, administrations as homogeneous black boxes and bureaucrats as individuals working ‘without hatred or passion’ to implement a broader vision of which they remain largely ignorant. The idea for this special issue emerged out of a feeling of unease with such renderings which, although providing important elements of understanding about the nature of bureaucratic power and its effects, do not fully reflect the insights we gained through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in international bureaucracies. This collection continues a conversation initiated by Laura Bear and Nayanika Mathur who urge us to examine bureaucracies ‘as an expression of a contract between citizens and officials that aim to generate a utopian order’ (2015: 18). We argue that a focus on actors working in international organisations allows the exploration of distinctive bureaucratic subjectivities forged in these settings. By exploring the affective life of international bureaucracies, we seek to understand how actors maintain a sense of agency in spite of the tedious and burdensome nature of the administrative procedures in which they take part.

This paper is about the intensive narrative work and the agony of adoptive mothers on how to talk to their children about their lives before the adoption, about a story that was partly unknown, about a past that the parents haven’t lived. These anxieties reveal that this struggle with language and the creation of stories was fundamental to their own becoming as mothers. I argue that a ‘kinning process’ is sustained through the repetition of children’s biographies and that, through the narration and re‐narration, of children’s placement and the existence of the birthmothers, adoptive mothers construct relations with their children and also their maternal self.

Utopia, from the ancient Greek ‘’ (‘not a place’ or ‘nowhere’), quite literally refers to a place that is not there. Perhaps this emphasis on utopia as place is most starkly present in Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia which was an island. Bureaucracy, a combination of the French word (desk or office) and the Greek word (rule), also originated as a form of rule or political power that is embedded in place – a desk, an office. These two types of non‐places have, up until now, been kept largely separate. The Weberian disenchantedness and the ‘iron cage of modernity’ that is most commonly associated with bureaucracy are normally considered a far cry from the desirability implicit in non‐place places and states of being that are utopias. In this act of putting utopias in conversation with bureaucracy and, in fact, considering utopianisation simultaneously a process and an ideal that forms the foundation of international organisations, this collection makes a series of intellectual manoeuvres that I briefly touch on as a focus on scale (the international/national/local); bureaucratisation and utopianisation as processes rather than states‐of‐(non‐)being; methodological hooks; imaginaries of bureaucracy; and the value of comparison.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12754 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12754 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12755 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12755 Peasant economy, military state and Chinese capitalism in the Wa State of Myanmar]]> 28 1

If the moral economies of underprivileged communities are defined in opposition to the rationality of political economy, it is easy to overlook the moral justifications of market and state. War economies and military states, however, force us to look at the nodes of moral and economic action that connect the powerful and the powerless. The Wa State of Myanmar, a de‐facto state governed by an insurgent army, represents the making of such a moral economy of militarism. Examples from the peasant economy, the military state and Chinese capitalism demonstrate the articulation of different work ethics, moral frameworks and economic arrangements. Moral and economic values are combined specifically in codes of honour, military discipline and , that is, the value entanglements that are at the core of the moral economy of militarism.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12757 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12757 ]]> 28 1

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12551 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12551 ]]> 27 4

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12669 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12669 ]]> 27 4

This article focuses on how whiteness, in the process of being (re)enacted in its different everyday versions, becomes invisibilised at certain moments while reappearing at others as overly present. The article borrows Widmer's metaphor of race as two types of ‘watermarks’, that of a banknote that stands in to confirm authenticity when needed, and that of the marks left by glasses on a wooden surface. The idea is to consider the experiences of early 20th‐century Galician immigrants in the city of Salvador, Brazil. I argue that understanding this process of (in)visibility helps us comprehend some of the ways in which these immigrants were involved in both confirming and challenging local versions of what it means to be white. This analytical approach allows us to go beyond a homogenised, monolithic and ahistorical portrayal of whiteness, towards a more nuanced one that takes into account the heterogeneous combination of historical and contemporary, global and regional, hegemonic and alternative versions of whiteness.

This paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between the contested terrain of race and the politics of heritage and belonging in postcolonial Europe. Presenting material from the Netherlands, I argue that instead of reproducing the dyadic white‐majority–black‐minority framework, we must situate the negotiation of race in the triangular relationship between the persistent ‘whiteness’ of Dutch nationhood, the country’s postcolonial Afro‐Caribbean population and its more recent African postmigrant population. Discussing ‘African heritage’ projects by young Dutch people of Afro‐Caribbean and Ghanaian descent respectively, I discern two different critiques of the racialised exclusivity of Dutchness. Struggles for ‘Black citizenship’ seek recognition of African heritage as part of Dutch colonial history and seek to inscribe Blackness into Dutch nationhood; ‘Afropolitan’ celebrations of ‘being African in the world’ not only question the primacy of Dutch national belonging but also resist hegemonic formulations of Blackness. In this ‘trialogue’, race gets done and undone in intersection with other axes of difference and inequality, including citizenship status, migration trajectory and African origin. The triadic framework the paper advances not only conveys the complexity of racial dynamics in heritage‐making, but also sensitises to alternative understandings of belonging and alternative sources of critique.

In this paper, we argue in favour of an anthropological focus on the ‘doing’ of whiteness, which is necessary to understand how various, contrasting but interconnected articulations of whiteness come into being. We focus on two ethnographic vignettes that reveal the different structural positions, within a culturalised and racialised order, of the anthropologists developing them. The vignettes focus on liberal and progressive ‘middle‐class’ articulations of whiteness that often remain unrecognised and – especially – bathed in innocence, but that go to the heart of the contemporary European question. We take issue with the liberal peripheralisation of racism, a discursive practice that locates racism in the ‘white working class’ and symbolically exorcises it from the ‘moderate’, centrist core of Europe. Rather than truly facing racism, what seems at stake for many liberals and progressives is the self‐image of being well‐meaning ‘respectable’ and ‘good’ middle‐class people.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12717 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12717 Horizons of possibility and migration from Serbia]]> 27 4

Following nearly two decades of wartime ‘entrapment’, in 2009 the conditions of possibility for mobility fundamentally changed for Serbian citizens. Of both symbolic and material consequence, Serbia’s return to respectable geopolitical standing also marked a shift toward more nuanced stance‐taking in relation to mobility – at least for members of an urban, educated generation who have taken advantage of renewed opportunities to travel. In this article, I explore the real and symbolic geographies invoked by young potential migrants in talk of leaving and staying in Serbia. I read mobility narratives as proxies for commentary on a host of other political and socio‐economic issues, drawing attention to the role of international travel in the construction of imaginary yet authoritative ‘contrapuntal’ lives lived elsewhere. I show how such imaginaries both colour how potential and return migrants narrate their everyday navigations in the ‘here and now’ and give moral weight to migratory aspirations for, and experiences of, lives lived in the ‘then and there’. In unpacking the emic terms ‘negative selection’ and , I argue that the foundational motif of these varied imaginaries is a deep investment in the ideology of meritocracy, a morally inflected register for the articulation of aspiration as well as critique.

The materiality of and daily life in urban high‐rise buildings has barely been researched, especially when compared to the rich anthropological and architectural studies that exist on rural architecture. This article engages with indoor climate control in an urbanising environment. It considers urban architecture as a social field characterised by the interaction of diverse actors such as architects, policymakers, investors and residents. Based on ethnographic data from subtropical Chongqing (China) in winter, the broader aim is to outline an urban architectural anthropology that approaches the house from a holistic perspective with regard to its materiality, namely by considering both its structure and interior architecture, all embedded in the larger political and economic context. With regard to thermal comfort, architects often focus on the qualities of the material structure of a building for indoor climate control, while social science approaches tend solely to consider the objects and practices inside those structures. In following a practice–arrangement nexus approach as put forward by Schatzki (2010), I propose to think the two levels as interrelated. Ethnography‐based research thus contributes significantly to grasping how people react to buildings and make themselves comfortable in social, socio‐material and thermal terms.

Through an ethnography of the practices of certain agri‐food distribution channels, I propose to examine the interactions and exchanges that take place between a peasant world and a citizen world, both having rather different imaginations and strategies. This approach focuses on the perceived temporality of the actors and their management of the complex relationships between progress and nostalgia. Some aspects of the countryside's economic dependence on the city, combined with a set of creative micro‐entrepreneurial strategies orientated towards subsistence and opposed to the downgrading of agricultural work, give substance to an ambivalent relationship. In this scenario, small farmers are a symbolic and moral resource. They feed a political imagination that allows urban consumers with high social capital to satisfy their own desire to reclaim the space they inhabit as ‘critical’ consumers. This circuit is driven by a flow of exchanges that involves economic, symbolic and political aspects: in order to distinguish interactions, I shall be challenging the notion of moral economy.

]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12721 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12721 Contested pasts and contemporary practices]]> 27 4

In this introduction to the special section on ‘Doing Race in Europe’ we take up the notion of race as an ‘absent presence’ to deal with two related issues. First, we consider the historically contested position of race in the discipline of anthropology. Second, we think through the notion of an ‘absent presence’ conceptually and methodologically so as to develop a relational approach enabling us to analyse race in practice. We take as a point of departure the idea that we cannot know race in advance, and that we therefore need to study how it comes about, and how it is made and unmade in specific situations. We therefore call for renewed ethnographic attention to how race is made absent and present in multiple ways. This special section is the first joint publication of the EASA network for the anthropology of race and ethnicity (ARE).

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12572 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12572 Law and the construction of identities among undocumented migrants]]> 27 3

In early 2001 Masséré Sissoko left his village in the Malian region of Kayes and began a journey to France. He travelled under the name of Mahamadou Diarra, an identity with which he obtained a visa. Years later, as he was undocumented in France, Sissoko reused this identity in order to obtain ‘papers’ that could reduce the effects of his irregularity and eventually maximise his possibilities of regularisation. This meant fabricating an existence for his double by producing documents in his name (i.e. tax declarations, bank receipts) and even sometimes by embodying this identity. The multiplicity and wide range of documents that Sissoko and his fellow ‘undocumented’ migrants manipulate thus allow them to free themselves from the omnipresence of the border and to construct a life. However, identity documents, and all other documents, are constantly subjected to authenticity tests and inquiries of veracity. What does it mean to exist when you cannot live under your own name? By following the personal journey of Masséré Sissoko and his double, this article explores the connections between identification, identity and the (im)possibilities of existing within a regime of illegality.

In 1963, Chairman Mao made a national hero of an ordinary soldier named Lei Feng, said to have been inspired by collectivism to do countless selfless deeds. Sceptical observers inside and outside China disparage the persistent Lei Feng legend, judging it to be a laughably fraudulent construct of the Communist Party. We take this contrast as an opportunity to examine the cultural politics of authentication and fakery. We show that critics of the Chinese regime take the propagation of ‘inauthentic’ evidence to be indicative of a government based on illegitimate tactics, or of a credulous population. Meanwhile, research participants in China, who consider Lei Feng stories and artefacts to intermingle evidential and pedagogical representation, justify the state's curation of the legend for societal good. Second, we contrast Chinese and western discussions about a Lei Feng‐related trick that a western news agency is said to have played on China on April Fool's Day. Examining the different framings of this story – that of satire, practical joke, fake news and rumour – we argue that how the fake is decoded depends on what political ends it serves, which include the ideological legacy of the Cold War as well as contemporary USA–China competition.

European nation states have introduced several forms of bordering and technologies of control, partly in order to deter non‐Western migrants from arriving and to encourage irregular migrants to leave. The bordering practices of the European nation states have now both been dispersed into third countries and come to include frontline bureaucrats within the nation states, including social workers and healthcare staff. Without much public debate, healthcare and social welfare policies have become part of migration management policies. In the following, I explore new ways of understanding the relationship between borders, healthcare and the management of migrants in the welfare state of Norway. The article draws on fieldwork with migrants who have been irregularised after their asylum applications were rejected. I introduce the concept of ‘intimate borders’ to call attention to how irregular migrants are managed in the encounters between migrants and frontline bureaucrats such as healthcare workers. In these encounters, the legal status of the person becomes an ordering mode, and the potential disease to be treated becomes a subordinate object of concern. Everyday bordering practices are contingent not only on legal regulations and public discourses, but also on migrants’ habituation to and enactment of bordering practices.

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Countless reconciliation initiatives – state and non‐state, local and international – have emerged to redress the legacies of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Based on fieldwork with two Rwandan peace‐building organisations, this article takes an ethnographic perspective on how these organisations measure or evaluate ‘how reconciled’ Rwandans are. Organisations’ measurements of reconciliation are based on testimonies they collect from genocide survivors and perpetrators. They read ‘indicators’ into these testimonies to quantify the progress of reconciliation in a given region, but their process of deriving those numbers from testimony is never clear. I argue that organisation staff do not only stake their expertise on ‘objective’ measures of reconciliation that manage the ambiguities of testimony, but also on their performance of gifted subjective intuition to discern ‘authentic’ testimony from that which conceals ongoing enmity. As such, anthropological understandings of modern evaluative practices must take seriously both subjectivity and objectivity as potential sources of power and authority. In the end, evaluating reconciliation may not only be driven by organisational or political demands to produce metrics, but also by organisation staff's search for confirmation of their own worth in the post‐conflict recovery project and for signs that violence will not erupt in Rwanda again.

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While the transnational flows of goods, people and ideas have been increasing in the last decades, many people in Africa feel excluded from the possibilities that these connections bring. In Nairobi, some multi‐level marketing schemes are offering everyone the chance to partake in new forms of wealth creation, and hundreds of thousands of Kenyans have joined them. Such schemes have been travelling rapidly worldwide and seem to successfully circulate neoliberal rationalities and fantasies. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, the paper explores these multi‐level marketing schemes as travelling models, which need to be translated into local contexts. These schemes do not conform to conventional definitions of fraud but bring suspicions of it to the fore, doubts that haunt their glamorous marketing presentations. Such whispers imply the re‐emergence of notions of morality that are very much the opposite of the ideas that the schemes bring with them. Studying such schemes allows us to explore how actors convey, desperately want to partake in, and believe in capitalist rationalities and imaginaries. The suspicions of fraud also suggest a certain disillusionment with these rationalities, making apparent that they have become a matter of belief.

This article is about money doubling in Makeni, northern Sierra Leone. It elaborates on ordinary people’s difficulties to participate personally in a visibly growing economy and monetarised social environment. For this purpose, it takes the ethnographic case of literal money doubling: young men’s promises to physically double investors’ cash using original currency paper and chemicals. Although and because this investment opportunity retrospectively turned out to be a ‘fake’ promise, I argue that it made perfect sense in and of Makeni’s contemporary socio‐economic landscape. It epitomised a variety of practices that outwardly and alluringly promised a prosperous future and more equal redistribution of wealth, yet retrospectively proved disappointing. Money doublers assimilated local people’s aspirations and disappointments to make their performances convincing. Displaying their knowledge of the secrets to quick and sustainable wealth production, they combined narratives of what people already knew about their own failure and fellow citizens’ success with visions of future progress. Therefore, money doubling offers a powerful and multifaceted lens for illuminating patterns and transformations in Makeni’s contemporary economic, moral, social and political environment in which local people and researchers struggled to make out the truth about beneficial practices and actors.

This article analyses the online dating activities of Ghanaian young men and women. Finding online friends and lovers who reside in the USA or Europe is considered a fruitful tactic to deal with the often harsh conditions of everyday life in Accra. The first part of the article focuses on the connections between online and offline relationships in specific communities called or ‘stranger quarters’. The second part looks into the intricacies of online love relationships and how these upset or transform existing gender categories, gender roles and relations in the communities. The way in which young women take part in the online world is reminiscent of some of the characteristics of the popular figure of the trickster. Online trickery has affected offline mechanisms of redistribution and has thereby altered the moral economy within the communities, whereby friends straddle between principles of loyalty and trust towards one another while making personal fame and fortune. The article concludes with a discussion of tricking practices, the meanings and moralities of deception, and how research on fraudsters and tricksters touches on some of the ethical dilemmas inherent to the discipline of anthropology.

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We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls as they are today. Walls are, however, age‐old. Empires built walls. And if we look closer, we can see that there are still traces of the old imperial visions in the modern borders and border walls. In this essay I will look at the connections of wars and walls, walls and empires. Through a radical historicisation I will argue that there is a link between the installation of border walls (here) and the unsettling of communities (there). The current border regime is part of a larger and older project of colonial accumulation by dispossession and expulsion; stealing wealth, labour force and time. I will also argue that border crossing discloses the cracks in the dominant narration of borders and that travellers without papers denaturalise what are otherwise naturalised borders, and politicise what are otherwise depoliticised borders. I will illustrate this argument by following travellers without papers along the railways in the Balkans; tracing Afghan deportees in Kabul; and following the social life of the materialities used in the oil sites in Iran and in the wall between Mexico and the USA.

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In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and the rise of post‐truth in media and politics, trust and authenticity appear as fleeting qualities, having been replaced by suspicions of fraud and fakery. By looking at defrauding and faking as practices and questioning public discourses about them, laden with normative evaluations, as they are, this special issue ethnographically explores everyday interactions and imaginaries, to learn about the underlying political, economic and moral changes. Studying defrauding and faking opens a unique window to various key issues: the emergence (and crisis) of routines and technologies for establishing trustworthiness and genuineness, fraudsters’ knowledge production and problematic research ethics. We feel that anthropologists need to challenge themselves with topics that afford no sure footing, in moral or political terms, to produce new irritants, questions and insights.

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In 2018, social anthropology finds itself increasingly concerned with its technical, legal and political conditions of possibility. The long‐term effects of austerity, financialisation and the technological transformation of media on teaching, research and publishing have led to intense struggles over the labour and property regimes underpinning the discipline. In responding to these challenges, anthropologists seem to be re‐conceptualising their own personhood and labour through the diverse conceptualisations of their interlocutors. However, it is also important to remember what makes social anthropology and its unique professional challenges but a small facet of a larger human condition. By way of conclusion, I offer kinship (the public's constitutive other) as one potential means of grappling with the limitations of social anthropology's own publicity.

This two‐part overview of contemporary Russian anthropology focuses in detail on the work of several scholars and situates it in the changing landscape of Russian academia. The main issue I address is the debated academic identity of anthropology as ‘historical science’ as it is officially classed in Russia. Proceeding in a case‐study manner, I aim to re‐conceptualise the relationship between anthropology and history from the point of view of the anthropology of time, not merely by historicising anthropology but also by anthropologising history. I ask what temporal frameworks underscore the relationship between anthropology and history as it is thought about by the scholars I explore.

This two‐part overview of contemporary Russian anthropology focuses in detail on the work of several scholars and situates it in the changing landscape of Russian academia. The main issue I address is debates about an academic identity of Russian anthropology as ‘historical science’. Given that in Western anthropology, history has become one of the leading modes of anthropological analysis and that the turn to history marked a radical repositioning of anthropology's very subject, it is important to explore how such configurations of history and anthropology work in other anthropological traditions and what the reasons are for turning to history or, conversely, avoiding it, for specific national, continental and transnational anthropological schools. In this article, I explore these questions by focusing on anthropology in Russia with an aim of reassembling the relationship between anthropology and history from the point of view of the anthropology of time. I ask what temporal frameworks underscore the relationship between anthropology and history. I explore these understandings ethnographically, that is, through ethnographic interviews with Russian scholars in addition to close readings of their works.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12640 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12640 Cutting connections and forging ties in the Tajik Pamirs]]> 27 2

How does remoteness emerge from the very connections envisioned to unmake it? And how do connections arise from remoteness? In this article, I address these questions by taking remoteness and connectivity not as opposites but as entangled forces that condition each other. To explore this evolving nexus, I focus on provisions: the notion of provision denotes, at once, a foresight or visions of a better future, a rule or law, and supplies coming in from the outside. Looking into three junctures of cutting connections and forging ties in the Tajik Pamirs – the Soviet system of Moscow provisioning, wayfaring Pajero drivers and international trophy hunting – I show how provisions (of all three kinds) were instrumental in shaping the repeating return of remoteness in the region.

The Malian town of Timbuktu, long considered the epitome of remoteness in the Western imagination, has undergone a dramatic transformation from tourist outpost to terrorism‐haunted site of a UN peacekeeping intervention, in a shift accompanying conflict‐hit Mali's wider relabelling as a ‘danger zone’. Casting an eye on this distressing turn, this article considers the ‘cartopolitics’ of distance and danger from a historical perspective while analysing the machinations of foreign interveners and cartographers. It shows how Mali's insertion into the ‘war on terror’ drew on colonial and precolonial mappings intermixing desire and danger, domination and fear, science and fantasy. Concluding, the article argues that if military strategy was once seen as paralysed by a ‘Vietnam syndrome’, today we see something akin to a ‘Timbuktu syndrome’ as Western powers obsess about controlling perceived dangers emanating from remote sites yet increasingly fear entering these ‘Timbuktus’ of a revived geographic imagination.

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What makes for an imaginary of remoteness that in turn produces economic yield? This article explores the interplay of remoteness and connectivity in Guizhou, a Chinese province that has long been constructed as rugged, lacking in civilisation, inaccessible and effectively immune to control. Situated in China's southwest, largely populated by minority peoples, the province has been iconic of the ‘remote’ across centuries of Chinese history, despite the region having no international border. In this article, an American anthropologist, an anthropologist from Guizhou and an American geographer interrogate the shifting valences of remoteness during and since the period of Mao. We interrogate Guizhou's remoteness as simultaneously derogated and celebrated and consider the emergence of a ‘post‐alteric imaginary’ reflecting contemporary realignments of state–populace, urban–rural and Han–minority. Infrastructure development is read alongside tourism development as we probe the synergy between national imaginaries that distance Guizhou and local strategies of self‐fashioning and branding.

Remoteness is as much about a position in topological as in topographical space. Remote areas might look inaccessible from the outside, but, for Ardener (Ardener, E. 1989. , M. Chapman (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell), feel open and vulnerable from the inside, as their connectivity with the outside world is never fully controlled by locals. Drawing on material gathered in northern Chad, we argue that this lack of conceptual reciprocity can also lead to the opposite: a trope of permanent aggression, based on the local endorsement of external negative stereotypes. From the outside, the ‘locals’ are seen to be archetypical raiders, thieves and uncouth. From the inside, people concur in these descriptions to a surprising degree, insisting on their disorder, unpredictability and violence. This endorsement of alterity grants northern Chad a particular place in Saharan history, geography and ethnography.

Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The ‘wild’ landscapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach and work in these far‐flung mine sites consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and unpredictable waterways, locales that restrict and confound formal infrastructural development. In such terrains, prospectors must devise innovative ‘fluid infrastructures’ that allow the mine's continued existence against all odds. Local perceptions of the wilderness in these locales offer insights into remoteness not as regions untouched and inaccessible, but as intimately connected to the diffuse and manifold forms that global economies take. These are zones in which the wild is in fact turned inside out.

The Soviet Union and its successor states have been avid supporters of a modernisation paradigm aimed at ‘overcoming remoteness’ and ‘bringing civilisation’ to the periphery and its ‘backward’ indigenous people. The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad, built as a much‐hyped prestige project of late socialism, is a good example of that. The BAM has affected indigenous communities and reconfigured the geographic and social space of East Siberia. Our case study, an Evenki village located fairly close to the BAM, is (in)famous today for its supposed refusal to get connected via a bridge to the nearby railroad town. Some actors portray this disconnection as a sign of backwardness, while others celebrate it as the main reason for native language retention and cultural preservation. Focusing on discourses linking the notions of remoteness and cultural revitalisation, the article argues for conceptualising the story of the missing bridge not as the result of political resistance but rather as an articulation of indigeneity, which foregrounds cultural rights over more contentious political claims. Thus, the article explores constellations of remoteness and indigeneity, posing the question whether there might be a moral right to remoteness to be claimed by those who view spatial distance as a potential resource.

Since the 1990s, several ‘special zones’ have appeared along China's border with Myanmar and Laos. Often described as lawless enclaves of vice, gambling and smuggling, the study of those spaces has focused mostly on their exceptionality and ambiguous form of sovereignty. However, rather than simply keeping the state out, those special zones bring the state in, through investments, infrastructures and deals with government officials. Through an analysis of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, in northern Laos, this paper argues that it is precisely through the ambiguous presence of the state that these spaces manage to maintain a unique level of autonomy. Moving from James Scott's famous discussion of highland communities in Southeast Asia, I term this Zomia 2.0: a modern attempt to keep the state out at the edges of Asia's greatest power, characterised as much by political remoteness as by neoliberal connectivity.

What makes a place remote? Is remoteness a factor of geography and topography, is it a construct of connectivity, or is it an outcome of politics and history? For the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, inhabiting the Indo‐Tibetan borderlands, remote denotes multiple aspects: lack of material infrastructure and transport, improper communication and geographical isolation. Living an enclave existence far away from centres of commerce, governance and industry, Monpas consider themselves to be backward. Yet, Monyul, the traditional homeland of the Monpa communities, is of high strategic importance in the still unresolved India–China border conflict. Its present remoteness is woven into the politics of borders and frontiers. Through a focus on the particular history and politics of Monyul, I show how colonial and postcolonial policies transformed the region into a remote periphery. While infrastructure and connectivity can lead to the economic and political integration of a region, the withholding of the same makes a region appear remote. I bring the concept of selective connectivity to understand how road infrastructure is a particular form of exercising state control.

In response to the Syrian conflict, the biggest humanitarian challenge since the Second World War, aid organisations have set up large‐scale cross‐border operations. Aid convoys and workers within Syria have become targets, forcing most operations to be carried out remotely from the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, a ‘little Aleppo’ hosting more than 300,000 Syrians. This produces a transnational humanitarian social field embedded in historical, political and economic relations. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among aid workers and organisations providing relief assistance remotely, this article analyses the production of humanitarian remoteness, both rhetorically and in practice, shaped by remote technologies and the division of labour. In the case of Syria, the normalisation of remote practices and the dependency on local aid workers and organisations ultimately increases the distance between donors and beneficiaries inside Syria, although it reinforces the illusion of control among aid managers.

Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading liberal voices, the world map today looks more rugged and uneven than it has in a long time. While some areas are smoothly connected to global capital and cultural flows, others are becoming more marginalised and ‘distant’, at least from the viewpoint of global centres of power. In this introduction, we build an analytical approach to remoteness as a social and political process rather than a primordial condition. We emphasise three key aspects of remoteness: its deep entanglement with forms of connectivity; its economic usefulness; and its amenability to ‘remote control’. In considering these aspects, we bring anthropology's long heritage of studying ‘marginal’ societies to bear on the political resurgence of remoteness in a new world disorder of proliferating global dangers, lucrative frontier economies and heritage‐making.

Based on fieldwork carried out in the highlands of Madagascar since 2013, this article explores how insecurity and banditry are reshaping the relations between state authority and rural Malagasy regions perceived as ‘remote’ despite their increasing connections with transnational – and often illegal – trade networks of natural resources. Often classified as dangerous ‘red zones’ because of the presence of bandits () who combine cattle theft with attacks against villages, trucks and , these areas become crucial for local processes of reaffirmation and renegotiation of state power in historically marginalised regions. By analysing the connections between ‘remote’ areas and illegal trade networks of a global scale, I discuss how remoteness acquires different meanings according to people's power and economic positions, and how social inequalities and power relations are reshaped in areas that are increasingly connected with neoliberal global markets, thanks to – and not in spite of – their supposed remoteness.

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The limits and consequences of humanitarian military operations continue to be major issues in Western public debates on global security, democracy and human rights. This article focuses on the intersection of war and humanitarianism, situating the study of humanitarian militarism within a European context in which a reinvigorated proliferation of the military ethos coexists with ongoing transformations in European military culture and a resurgence of nation‐state ideologies. Building on a reflection of the historical consolidation of humanitarian militarism and interviews conducted with soldiers, the paper explores the politics of humanity produced by humanitarian militarism.

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Guiding and transforming our creative practices, this paper argues for a critical investigation of the techno‐material affordances at play in doing visual research with digital media. It interrogates how software and skill might interact to mediate creative engagements with digital materialities. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies of and with the Korsakow System – an authoring system for creating generative multiple links between media assets – I show how software combined with other imaging technologies can (re‐)focus attention and action towards the intangible workings of digital code. Three exercises will demonstrate how a with relational media systems challenges and complements ethnographic filmmaking through the adoption of iterative software and design methodologies. Rather than gaining control over code, the aim is to gain control over the loss of it in the field and in front of the screen. In the context of an advancing digital visual ethnography, such a affords an experiential and responsive mode of knowledge production sensitising us to the complexly layered affordances and constraints of digital materialities and the in which they are entangled.

In this special section, we conceptualise ‘Skilled mediations’ to examine the following questions from several ethnographic perspectives: How do skills and media interact, enable and limit our engagement in our material and social environments? How can this be studied ethnographically? We take our previous works on ‘skilled visions’ and ‘enskilment’ as starting points to define skilled mediation as a mode of engagement with the senses, practice, skill and media.

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This article investigates the development of competitive motivation in children in the context of the extreme emphasis on competition in post‐reform Chinese society. Drawing from ethnographic and experimental approaches, it compares the competitive modes of children in an urban middle‐class school and a semi‐rural working‐class school. A conceptual model is developed that distinguishes between zero‐sum and mutualistic modes of competition, and the individual orientation and group orientation. The zero‐sum mode emphasises the benefits and losses derived from winning and losing, while the mutualistic mode emphasises the elements of competition that are beneficial to all participants regardless of the outcome. Through these distinctions the article contests the common association of competitiveness with individualism and the opposition between competition and cooperation, and proposes a working model for a comparative study of competitiveness.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12595 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12595 An acoustemology of the chainsaw]]> 27 1

Within sensory anthropology, scholars have for some time now developed ways to think with acoustic phenomena and to interpret the multiple meanings of sounds and soundscapes. Yet actual practices of listening and experiences of listening subjects feature rather less in that field. Drawing on a case study of chainsaw use in tree felling, this article presents listening as a mode of acoustic knowing that is both aesthetic and epistemological. This is achieved by combining a consideration of listening as a skilled practice with a problematisation of the notion of ‘noise’. Whereas noise is commonly conceived of as unwanted, chaotic and meaningless sound, skilled chainsaw use shows how a particular practice re‐evaluates what is defined as noise and even takes it as an entry to acoustic knowing. Through a careful description and analysis of the process of tree felling, this article traces how skilfully mediated listening with the chainsaw develops from a felt, embodied sense of a sound world that is still indeterminate and ambiguous to recognisable ‘objects’ of clearly identifiable sounds. It is argued that through such a broader conceptualisation of listening as a form of sensing, we can more deeply investigate the sonic orders of sociocultural practices.

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During the last decade, mimetic practices of imagining, embodying and situating (past) events evolved into a prevalent phenomenon of vernacular culture symptomatic of an increasingly mediatised world. To explore popular historical re‐enactments as media practices, I draw on the example of the Cologne Tribes () from Cologne/Germany, a community of amateurs whose members emulate the historic lifeworlds of the Huns and Mongolians as a leisure activity. In their performances they creatively appropriate a wide range of global visual, sonic and textual inscriptions that are translated into bodily actions and material artefacts in a complex process of re‐mediation. Whereas academics commonly consider the embodied knowledge produced in popular re‐enactment as false, fake or mere fantasy, to the practitioners the construction of ‘authenticity’ is a matter of continuous negations. This paper explores how the concept of ‘skilled mediation’ resonated with the local notion of the ‘Hunnic eye’ that the Cologne Tribes developed to designate an ‘aesthetic of authenticity’ that is constituted in the eye of the beholder.

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]]> 10.1111/1469-8676.12515 https://www.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12515 Transgression and digression]]> 26 4

This paper explores gender in stand‐up comedy based on 20 months of ethnographic research in Finland and recent media discussion involving the booking of performers for a national comedy tour. As the vast majority of stand‐up comedians are men, discussions of gender tend to focus on the anomalousness of female comedians. These debates often rely on essentialist views of women and stand‐up comedy, presenting female comedians as transgressive due to the perceived incompatibilities of women and comedy. However, the situation in the clubs and performances is more complex. I chart this territory by looking at gender in relation to ‘invention’ and ‘convention’ in stand‐up comedy performance. I explore how some of the conventional, established and expected aspects of stand‐up, such as the public use of power and threat of failure, are related to ideas of gender. I then go on to show how comedy enables invention, new and/or unique ideas and forms. This allows comedians to approach and enact gender in more digressive ways: taking indirect, experimental paths and imaginatively shifting between perspectives and positions to subvert and question roles and patterns. As stand‐up becomes more diverse, discussing gender requires a more nuanced approach going beyond a simple binary.

The concept of isolation has dogged anthropological studies of rural Ireland. This paper re‐conceptualises isolation through ethnographic work undertaken on the minibuses run by Rural Transport projects in five counties of Ireland. Instead of seeing isolation as an embedded characteristic of Irish landscapes, histories or of the ageing body, the paper describes dynamic, shifting expectations of belonging and community. On the Rural Transport buses, characteristic moments of witnessing ‘figures in the landscape’ during predictable and routinised journeys produce strikingly new negotiations of alterity and sameness among the passengers. The paper argues for the significance of these moments in developing a socialised, inscribed landscape and new senses of generative agency.

This essay aims to rethink the epistemological study of violence among the Yanomami's Venezuelan and Brazilian world. In doing so, I reopen some of the discussions between Marshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon/National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the context of the much longer debate about ‘innate aggressiveness’ (as virtue or vice) as it came to be revived in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and the protests against the Vietnam War.

This article looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. Building on fieldwork with disenfranchised urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe, it clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to precarious situations and life conditions. The article argues that the struggle to identify threats leads to a nervous sociality in which figures and social forces are examined for hidden intentions and negative potentials. Such circumstances engender an apprehensive bearing, as an affective state, posture and approach, through which social life is sought, investigated and controlled. It augments perceptivity and leads to a scanning and probing of social life that feeds into a social version of the hermeneutics of suspicion and generates a range of pre‐emptive practices.

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