Social Anthropology

State mega‐infrastructure projects in developing countries evoke challenges to citizenship and reconstruct the imagery of statecraft. The Ethiopian government's construction of a large dam in the Omo River evoked contesting accounts of development and legitimate governance among a variety of actors. Debates between relevant actors centre on classic topoi of the ‘development’ discourse but present seemingly irreconcilable views. In the process, discourses of technocratic expertise claiming to evade ‘politics’ as well as culturally grounded socio‐economic narratives are mobilised. They are juxtaposed here to develop an anthropological interpretation of the discursive positions, connecting the analysis to a consideration of precarious citizenship and coercive state consolidation in Ethiopia.

Although there is by now a substantial body of ethnographic work on contemporary mosques in the West, none of this engages seriously with recently developed insights from material culture and material religion studies. Architectural critics and religious reformists criticise what they perceive as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘Oriental’ designs, whereas others interpret contemporary mosque design in terms of politics of space and religious identity politics. Taking a more holistic approach and based on ethnographic research on the designing process, this article argues that discussions about mosque design in Europe revolve around three major concerns: identity politics, religious tradition, and affect.

In this article I explore and investigate the concept of ‘mass‐gifts’ (Bird‐David and Darr), based on fieldwork in eastern Germany among product promoters in wholesale and retail environments. After introducing mass‐gifts, I show how they are employed by promoters for the intended purpose (persuading customers to purchase). However, mass‐gifts are also appropriated by these precarious workers to create social networks. In so doing, I argue that they simultaneously recreate the social aesthetic of work in the state socialist era, where factories were a nexus of sociality – in stark reality to the social and economic precariousness faced today by promoters.