Social Anthropology

The ethnographic turn has been the focus of recent debate between artists and anthropologists. Crucial to it has been an expansive notion of the ethnographic. No longer considered a specialised technique, the essays of Clifford and others have proposed a broader and more eclectic interpretation of ethnography – an approach long considered to be the exclusive preserve of academic anthropology. In this essay, we look more critically at what the ethnographic turn has meant for artists and anthropologists. To what extent does it describe a convergence of perspectives? Or does it elide significant differences in practice?

, a circular dance with set steps, and , human towers, are two types of human movement phenomena in Catalonia of high cultural and political relevance. This article analyses these phenomena through the lens of the moving body. It develops the anthropological and sociological reading of performance in a philosophical and political direction, by emphasising the generative capacity and of the human body and introducing the perspective of a ‘bodily commentary’ on socio‐political developments. This approach can be applied historically or to politics in the making, and here documents the physical and ideological extension of the beyond the into a geopolitical and competitive neoliberal sky.

This article examines the politics of temporality and hope in relation to a political imagination generated by constituencies of an East European Left. In looking in particular at how a socialist‐inspired notion of internationalism may serve as a tool to animate future‐oriented political imaginations, the article also marks an argument for rethinking anthropological and Left historiographical practices, and to consider the affirmative valence of utopian imaginations as a form of critical action.

In this article, I explore how Christians and Muslims are produced as separate and mutually exclusive communities in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla. I argue that while the constitution of these groups as ‘communities’ is the result of a long history of unequal power relations and socio‐spatial segregation, the reproduction of the boundaries between the two depends on the active transmission of particular codes of conduct and modes of behaviour in the public sphere. It is through these discursive and bodily practices that difference is actively produced.

Police models travel around the globe and many arrive in the shape of police reforms in West Africa. On the ground, these transnational connections are composed of interactions between police officers carrying and receiving such models. Similar to the travel of other models, African officers usually adapt and subvert official reforms. In this article, we argue that the potential for wide‐ranging organisational change is caused not so much by these reform programmes, but rather emerges from the encounters that such travels bring along. In these encounters, officers tell stories that challenge or stabilise notions of police work for those involved.