Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, entitled ‘Envy and Greed: Ugly Emotions and the Politics of Accusation’, is guest edited by Geoffrey Hughes, Megnaa Mehtta, Chiara Bresciani and Stuart Strange.

Ugly emotions like envy and greed tend to emerge ethnographically through accusations (as opposed to self-attribution), de-centring the individual psyche and drawing attention to how emotions are deployed in broader projects of moral policing. Tracking the moral, social dimension of emotions through accusations helps to account concretely for the political, economic and ideological factors that shape people's ethical worldviews – their defences, judgements and anxieties. Developing an anthropological understanding of these politics of accusation leads us to connect classical anthropological themes of witchcraft, scapegoating, and inter- and intra-communal conflict with ethnographic interventions into contemporary debates around speculative bubbles, inequality, migration, climate change and gender. We argue that a focus on the politics of accusation that surrounds envy and greed has the potential to allow for a more analytically subtle and grounded understanding of both ethics and emotions.

Africanist scholarship and anthropological literature on envy offer a jaundiced take on the ugly feelings that can arise in the wake of increasing scarcity and inequality. Proposing an inductive approach that attends to the performativity of words and feelings, this article explores how a Gusii ideal of containing the expression and escalation of ugly feelings influences collective mutual help arrangements. It elaborates on local concerns with the ‘anti-help’, or the confrontational side of help where ugly feelings can be voiced, named, elicited or concealed. In doing so, the article tracks how containing the anti-help structures the relationship between language and emotion, while also acting upon inner experience and affording a political order where a variety of ugly feelings runs the risk of being reduced to envy.

Nakivale, the oldest refugee camp in Uganda, hosts refugees fleeing various forms of political unrest from several African countries. Uganda's humanitarian framework makes it an attractive place for refugees. Little is known about the role that humanitarian policies play in shaping interactions between different actors or the politics of accusation that emerges within this settlement. In a context in which the status of a refugee can confer preferential access to scarce resources, different refugee communities struggle to define themselves, their neighbours and kin in terms of the camp's humanitarian language. Describing the everyday anxieties that define life in the camp, this article shows how accusations become powerful resources that refugees draw upon to meet the criteria for resettlement to a third country, but also how these forms of humanitarian assistance rely on processes of exclusion that create endemic accusations of corruption, criminality and even witchcraft.

The Tunisian coastal town of Zarzis is known for its generations of male emigrants to France and for initiating post-revolutionary harga – the ‘burning’ of the border via undocumented sea crossings to ‘Europe’. Despite migration being central to life in Zarzis, the harga is fraught with anxieties and moral accusations. While older generations accuse younger ones of chasing after easy money and causing jealousies, thereby fuelling the harga, young men reckon that risking the crossing is a matter of escaping social death. Men of all ages also agree that the harga is often women's fault. This article explores how the desire of making a living in Europe is evaluated in a departure town, and what the accusations and negative emotions it conjures up might reveal about people's understandings of their economic and moral lives in times of political and social change.

In the eastern part of Jordan's capital, Amman, where women maintained friendships through the exchange of help and support, accusations of maslaha (opportunism) had the potential to undermine relationships. Those accusations generated ugly feelings characterized by a confusion between the things wrong with oneself that make one vulnerable to the problem of maslaha and the things wrong with Jordanian society that make maslaha so widespread. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in one East Amman neighbourhood, Tal al-Zahra, between 2011 and 2015, this article explores the ways that encounters with maslaha felt ugly, the way these ugly feelings generated critiques of contemporary Jordanian morals, and the role of these feelings in generating ethical reflection by prompting women to see themselves as separate from, and critical of, the societies in which they live.

In Australian mining towns like Moranbah, relationships between labour, capital and the state have long been defined by struggles over housing amidst cascading cycles of boom and bust linking global commodity markets to local real estate. Most recently, the emergence of ‘fly-in-fly-out’ labour arrangements, partially in response to rampant real estate speculation, have challenged mine workers’ rights to housing and community. Focusing on the schadenfreude that accompanied the public vilification of one failed, small-time real estate speculator as a case study who is contrasted with the figure of the Cashed-up-Bogan, this article shows how accusations of greed are mobilized to political effect. While greed's tendency to emerge discursively as an accusation might make it seem like an attractive critical discourse, its putative connections to embodiment and the visceral give it an individualizing tendency that allows it to be wielded more easily against persons than institutions, undermining broader structural critiques.

This essay reviews three edited volumes published recently in the field of infrastructure studies: The Promise of Infrastructure edited by H. Appel, N. Anand and A. Gupta, Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality edited by I. Strebel, A. Bovet and P. Sormani, and Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by K. Hetherington. The first of the volumes is an inspiring collection of chapters discussing how theory making and ethnographic practice change when objects such as roads, water pipes or bridges become per se objects of anthropological engagement. The second volume gathers detailed accounts of maintenance and repair practices and analyses them as situated entanglements between humans, objects and knowledges. In the last volume, the contributing authors explore the rise of the Anthropocene in social sciences as a useful moment to focus on the blurriness of the conceptual distinction between nature and infrastructure, and humans and their environment.