Social Analysis

In Argentina's Gran Chaco, indigenous Guaraní men play football assiduously. This article explores how the game articulates with their sense of masculinity. Historical engagements in the Chaco's extractive labor markets have shaped understandings of masculinity that emphasize strength, courage, and provision. However, the decline of the region's extractive industries has made these forms of masculinity unattainable for young men. Games of football, including betting and drinking off the pitch, create bounded and embodied experiences that allow young men to experience fantasies of productivity and collectivity while disavowing everyday experiences of unemployment. These fantasies are particularly striking because they misrecognize women's growing role as providers even as they sustain an illusion of autonomous masculine politics that elides ties of kinship and dependency.

Where is the political located? Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of ‘marriage corners’ has mushroomed in city parks all over China. It consists of public gatherings attended by middle- to upper-middle-class parents attempting to find a partner for their child. The competitiveness of these gatherings and the vocabulary used by the participants when evaluating each other reflect political tensions of Chinese society without articulating them. Exploring this tension, the article argues for attending to the political ramifications of spaces where politics are silenced and denied. Hence, these marriage corners are examined as ‘paradoxical agoras’, that is, as constrained public spaces where politics are neither discussed nor decided, but rather embodied and practiced.

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of how markets are constituted and organized by foregrounding an anthropological focus on hospitality. Drawing on ethnographic insights from the gemstone market in China's Yunnan province, I argue that the use of online retail platforms has radically transformed social relations among traders, retailers, and customers. Despite such changes, and the seeming demise of ‘hosting’ as a central aspect of trading practices, hospitality remains critical to how business transactions are conducted. In particular, I demonstrate that hosting is highly productive of attachments between traders and customers, as well as certain places and products. The article concludes that hospitality is located in—and an essential element of—the ‘market’.

In this article I compare the different forms of participation of young anti-capitalists in two post-15M Spanish social movements in Lleida: White Tide and Platform of those Affected by Mortgages. The objective of the article is to analyze how biopolitical normalization processes work within social movements themselves. The article explains the normalization processes that adult activists exercise against young anti-capitalists, and the ways in which young people resist and seek to break with these processes in post-15M movements. All this allows us to understand how this normalization affects current social movements, establishing what is seen to be the ‘correct’ way to be an activist and creating processes of marginalization and censorship of those activists who occupy non-hegemonic social positions and who use other political forms.

Drawing on fieldwork carried out among different South African poor people's movements, this article explores what is played out on the fringes of this type of mobilization. Away from the noise of demonstrations, we can observe the particularities of a commitment that links together the cause being defended, the immediate socio-spatial environment of the activists, and their everyday worlds—a commitment that is rooted in the ‘regime of the near’. The space of activism thus coincides with the spaces in which the daily lives of these women and men unfold. I argue that this approach helps us better understand how mobilization spreads and how it can be sustained. It also makes it possible to measure more precisely that on which the legitimacy claimed by the movement and its visibility are based, as well as the persistence of commitment.

Hanoi's ‘collective housing quarters’ (KTTs) are a living legacy of its socialist past. Since the 2000s the state has set out radical redevelopment plans to transform KTTs into new buildings, but these have largely failed. What are the possible explanations for this failure? KTTs have gradually transformed in their material forms through self-built modifications initiated by residents. Such material property of KTTs bears on the pathway of redevelopment, but official discourses are silent about this. In this article I show how KTTs as things have the capacity to transform anthropological thinking. The material property of KTTs as a citywide phenomenon affords a particular scale of analysis, with which we can imagine humans as participants in the material world instead of viewing materialities as participants in society.