Anthropology in Action

As the new editors of Anthropology in Action, we join a growing community of sociocultural anthropologists who seek not only theoretical analysis but also practical engagement with some of the world's most pressing challenges, such as socioeconomic inequality, ethics and technological advancements, intensifying political instability and violence, resurgent authoritarianism, accelerating climate breakdown, and the enduring, often violent, legacies of colonialism are not isolated crises. Anthropology in Action emerged as a journal of applied anthropology to address these pressing questions and challenges. Yet, applied anthropology, both in past relation to this journal and in a broader understanding, has been typically understood through the lens of making anthropologists employable in non-university settings. This is either considered laudable, especially in the current moment of academic defunding and under-enrolment in anthropology courses, or it is viewed as a weakness for not persisting within the very academic structures that have caused this predicament. This binary thinking divides the field into academic anthropology and applied practice as if they were separate domains. The founding debates in applied anthropology have overwhelmingly focused on the need to place anthropologists into professional positions, given the limited academic career paths universities can offer (see Pink and Fardon 2004).

In this article we discuss how engaged futures anthropology might be mobilised in an anticipatory stance, to understand and be open to working with possible epistemic companions, with whom we may share a futures space, coincide, cross pathways and potentially collaborate. We discuss research undertaken with participants holding senior leadership positions across diverse sectors in order to consider how they know and understand possible futures and their temporalities – for instance, as hopeful, incremental and careful – and discuss the implications of this for a reflexive mode of epistemic companionship. Finally, we call for further consideration of new anticipatory modes of performing futures anthropology.

This article introduces the phenomenon of fractal time in the digital world of social media, experienced by the researcher as a continual series of instantaneous overlapping presents. Building on the established anthropological notion of chronologies, multiple presents experienced in the digital landscape will be conceptualised as one infinite kaleidoscopic simultaneous set of presents—allowing the digital landscape to be a place where infinite potentialities can occur simultaneously. This cyclical, yet amorphous sensation of temporality, experienced by users of social media, will form the basis for an understanding of fractal time and will lead to a discussion of self-making, temporal-manipulation and imagined spaces. Fundamentally, this will allow a reassessment of how notions of time and the present can be understood in a digital age.

Following Mexico's 2023 presidential decree protecting Indigenous sacred places, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) was tasked with creating a digital catalogue of place-beings for the Wixárika, Náayeri, O'dam, Audam and Mexicanero peoples. This project confronts fundamental epistemological tensions: Indigenous concepts of dynamic, relational ‘place-beings’ resist Western juridical categories of fixed ‘sacred sites’, while existing legal frameworks struggle to accommodate living place-making processes. As INAH researchers, we were charged with cataloguing holy springs, rocks, mountains and trees while participating in discussions on drafts for a new federal protection legislation. This article examines our methodological approach to reconciling Indigenous ontologies with state bureaucratic requirements to transform classificatory systems designed for static objects into instruments recognising animate, relational beings embedded in ongoing ceremonial practices.

This article examines performative damage – acts of personal harm as political protest – beyond contexts of individual precarity. While existing scholarship focuses on self-immolation and hunger strikes in circumstances of circumscription such as imprisonment, this article argues that performative damage constitutes a universal grammar of protest increasingly adopted by privileged actors, including during the Gaza genocide. Analysing a female Israeli activist's refusal of legal representation and consequent imprisonment in solidarity with the Palestinian experience of Israel's legal regime in 2018, the article demonstrates how performative damage operates through elective precarity, enabling privileged subjects to refuse their complicity and assigned supremacy within oppressive political structures. Such acts, particularly by women, transgress liberal norms privileging ‘rational’ political enunciation and enact the refusal required to make new worlds possible.