Social Anthropology

As anthropologists attempt to engage with the emergent idea that we are now living in the ‘Anthropocene’ – a geological epoch of our own making – it becomes important to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This paper asks whether anthropology is properly equipped for this challenge. By discussing the encounter with deep time in the earth sciences, I argue that deep time is not an abstract concept, but part of the phenomenal world impacting on people at the level of experience. The anthropological challenge, then, is to find new ways of exploring the interrelationships between human and geological temporalities.

Avoiding the pitfalls of both the reverential approach of ‘heritage belief’ and the overly critical one of ‘heritage atheism’, ‘heritage agnosticism’ is proposed as a theoretical middle path for the burgeoning field of heritage studies. The cases of Kyoto and the UNESCO World Heritage arena demonstrate the limits of a purely deconstructive analysis. The popular demand for historical veracity and authenticity, lay historicities, the ethnographic study of heritage institutions, and personal attachments to heritage are research topics that will benefit from heritage agnosticism, particularly if it accounts for the full variety of both professional and lay positions and voices.

This paper examines cases of suicide in rural Greece where the deceased have been provided with new affective narratives that detract from the circumstances of death. Living relatives redirect public attention away from the social taboo of suicide by reconfiguring affective stories that appeal to the local tool‐kit for dealing with unexpected death. Resultantly, the reputation of the family remains untainted by the connotations of immorality and insanity that suicide carries. Grabbing public attention, the affective story rouses sympathy for the victim and their family, whilst cultivating abhorrence towards a culprit, representing a final mark of respect to the dead person.

This article explores the changing nature of inheritance among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. Specifically, it examines how Hispano families have reworked the traditional application of inheritance, referring to property passed down the generations, to conceive of heroin addiction as ‘inherited’. It shows how this emerging formation of inheritance is shaped by, and refracts back upon, past configurations of property and belonging. This article reflects on intergenerational addiction as a modality of connection and continuity, but one that is entangled with experiences of loss. It highlights the implications of this tension for anthropological understandings of inheritance, addiction and the embodiment of history.

This article explores how urban temporalities in Maputo, Mozambique's capital, erupt from collapsed futures, which endure within the present as traces of that which will no longer be. The argument is built on an ethnographic analysis of (‘trying to make a life’), a temporal trope, which pre‐figures the future as a failure on a linear scale. Still, although it is identified by its collapse, the future wedges itself within the present as a trace of that which will never be. While manifesting the efforts needed in order to reach a desired objective, it also exposes the powers at work that inhibit its eventual realisation.