ca: A Pathfinder

This is a computer-generated pathfinder created against the Distant Reader study called ca.

Each Distant Reader study carrel is composed of many individual items. Each item is bibliographically described with author, title, date, summary, and keyword values. Below is a list of the items' most signficant keywords as well as lists of the items themselves. Purpusing the content of this pathfinder provides the student, researcher, or scholar with one way to get their heads around the scope of the carrel. The keywords include:

People; Anthropology; State; Life; Work; Time; Human; Politics; World; Public; Labor; Women; Violence; Social; Future; Health; Power; Care; Government; History; Body; Practices; Knowledge; York; Death; Value; Access; Media; Urban; Way; War; Migration; Crisis; Nation; Affect; Film; Disease; European; Speed; Snail

Depending on how this pathfinder was created, many of the bibliographic sections will include elaborations on the meaning(s) of the given keywords. These elaborations were generated by feeding the items' summaries to a large langauge model and asking the model to address the question, "What is X?", where "X" is the keyword. The result will be a few sentences of elaboration. Be forewarned. The elaborations are often plausible, but they should not be take as truth. Instead, they should be taken as points for consideration.

• Xenophobia in South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of Witchcraft by Hickel, Jason (2014) - “Xenophobia” in South Africa “Xenophobia” in South Africa: Over the following weeks, similar riots erupted in other informal settlements around Johannesburg, as well as in settlements around Durban and Cape Town, South Africa’s two other major cities.1 Tens of thousands of African immigrants—irrespective of their actual legal status—were harassed all across the country in mass eviction campaigns led by angry vigilante mobs comprised mostly of unemployed young males, despite the efforts of community members and local leaders to stop them. Keywords: africa; africans; anomie; cato; chaos; foreigners; globalization; ideas; immigrants; manor; order; people; press; south; south africa; university; violence; witchcraft; work; xenophobia
• Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina by D'Avella, Nicholas (2014) - Recall the frigate Libertad, impounded in Ghana at the behest of a Wall Street investment fund, suggesting that investment banks might share with Argentines an ecological sensibility of a world full of possible and opportunistic connection. Unlike economies in which dollars circulate alongside national currencies, in Argentina dollars have never been used for everyday transactions. Keywords: argentine; banks; bricks; crisis; currency; dollars; ecology; economic; estate; investment; mariela; money; new; past; people; peso; savings; university; value
• Socialities of Indignation: Denouncing Party Politics in Karachi by Ahmad, Tania (2014) - In condemning the brutality of political parties in general, and of the MQM in particular, residents generated a discursive space constituted through negation. Staying indoors during periods of possible urban unrest was common for Karachi residents, and strikes called by political parties or last-minute holidays announced by the government in anticipation of possible disturbances in the city frequently influenced the decision not to go outside. Keywords: chaudhry; city; confinement; events; government; home; indignation; karachi; mqm; news; pakistan; party; people; politics; residents; television; university; urban; violence
• Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Egyptian Uprising and a Sufi Khidma by Mittermaier, Amira (2014) - Other khidmas are open all year round. Uncertain and increasingly skeptical, those still protesting continued repeating three central demands—“bread, freedom, social justice” (‘aīsh, hurriyya, ‘adāla igtimā‘iyya)—yet with more and more friction around what these demands meant and mounting concern that they might have become empty slogans. Keywords: egypt; egyptian; ethics; food; future; giving; god; guests; justice; khidma; need; nura; people; present; press; square; tahrir; time; university; work
• Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa by Tamarkin, Noah (2014) - This idea neutralizes concerns that Abrami had raised at the recapture seminars that modern Jews determined descent from the mother, while Lemba Jewish DNA was derived from men only. In this article, by privileging the perspectives of Lemba South Africans and the historical and ethnographic contexts through which Lemba genetic data emerged and circulated, I offer an alternative reading of the social and political significance of DNA. Keywords: africa; american; connection; culture; diaspora; dna; history; jewish; jews; knowledge; lemba; mpaketsane; people; press; research; south; studies; study; university
• “Too Fat to Be an Orphan”: The Moral Semiotics of Food Aid in Botswana by Dahl, Bianca (2014) - Appropriating the Ugandan example, fat AIDS describes the complex that gives rise to fat orphans. Young attendees at Bathusi themselves began to self-consciously play with the stereotypes of starving versus fat orphans. Keywords: aids; bathusi; bodies; botswana; children; fat; feeding; food; foreign; government; kefilwe; kinship; orphans; people; relatives; resources; villagers
• Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination by Appel, Hannah (2014) - As was common to other Alt Banking participants as well, he recontextualized the assumptions and uses of his expertise, making them newly available for debate and repurposing. A self-identified Wall Street trader came down one lunch hour with a ream of goldenrod paper containing six ideas “from the minds of gainfully employed Wall Street economists and traders,” as the heading read: ban private campaign finance; restrict time spent on political campaigns; redesign the tax code; fix the revolving door between Wall Street and regulators and make lying perjury; clean up the mortgage mess; shake up the banking system. Keywords: alt; andrew; banking; capitalism; crisis; debt; finance; financial; group; ideas; imagination; list; mortgage; new; occupy; patrick; people; possibility; public; street; wall; work
• Muddy Labor: A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar by Watanabe, Chika (2014) - My argument is thus specifically about Japanese aid in Asia, and more concretely, in Myanmar. This aid ethic and its implications might differ for Japanese aid in other parts of the world. Keywords: aid; center; collective; development; intimacy; japanese; labor; members; myanmar; oisca; people; press; staff; trainees; training; university; work; workers
• Race, Sovereignty, and Civil Rights: Understanding the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy by Sturm, Circe (2014) - For many Cherokee, the logic of hypodescent, or the so-called one-drop rule, that overdetermines the social and racial classification of African descendants in the United States, creates a situation in which Cherokee Freedmen citizens threaten the Cherokee Nation’s status as a tribe of Indians more than do Cherokee-white descendants or any other admixtures. This is the long-standing situation of the Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of African Cherokee slaves once held by Cherokee slave owners.1 Despite a treaty in 1866 between the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. government granting them full tribal citizenship (Treaty with the Cherokee, 1866, 14 Stat. 799), Cherokee Freedmen continue to be one of the most marginalized communities within Native North America. Keywords: american; blood; cherokee; cherokee freedmen; cherokee nation; citizenship; court; election; federal; freedmen; indian; nation; people; race; rights; sovereignty; tribal
• Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can Tell Us about Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University Today by Kelty, Christopher (2014) - AA/CP: Why do you think anthropologists have been slow to embrace open access? CK: I think anthropologists have actually been rather enthusiastic supporters of open access—at least compared to some other disciplines in the humanities that have ignored it completely or adopted stances toward it that are even more conservative. Keywords: access; anthropology; labor; open; people; publishing; research; university; work
• Photography and Photo-Elicitation after Colonialism by Buckley, Liam (2014) - While colonial photographs appear frequently on the international scene in public venues such as galleries and exhibits (Banthall 1992; Thorner 2008), there has been little contemporary Gambian interest in the colonial period. This belief that the colonial photographs might serve as vessels for postcolonial histories—as opposed to being objects of aesthetic contemplation—has its roots in the way that colonial photographs first emerged as objects of academic inquiry. Keywords: aesthetic; anthropology; colonial; content; data; edwards; elicitation; gambia; history; images; interviews; life; local; new; past; people; photographs; press; university
• An Urban Frontier: Respatializing Government in Remote Northern Australia by Fisher, Daniel T. (2015) - This essay draws on research with such Aboriginal campers and their advocates in Darwin to argue that governmental initiatives associated with the NTER and their mediatization in a broader settler-Australian domain as scandal and humanitarian anxiety both legislate and elicit the wild status that now accrues to such urban camps and settlements.7 To do so, the essay brings an ethnographic lens to the sociospatial complexity of government in the Northern Territory, placing an ethnographic critique of emergency response and intervention into dialogue with spatial dimensions of sovereignty and alterity. Although there is some dispute around the demographic analysis of Indigenous urban migration, with some seeing little substantive change in quantitative terms (Taylor and Carson 2009; but see Fisher 2012; Lea 2012a), in Darwin Indigenous people and settler Australians alike experience these camps and bush spaces as much more crowded today than a decade ago, and the town itself as overrun with these seemingly “homeless” Indigenous campers. Keywords: aboriginal; australia; campers; camps; city; communities; country; darwin; government; grass; intervention; mile; northern; patrol; people; press; remote; settler; space; state; territory
• Occupation Bedbug: Or, the Urgency and Agency of Professional Pragmatism by Carr, E. Summerson (2015) - If Peter and his coworkers at U-Haven are preoccupied with bedbugs, they are certainly not the only ones. As one of Peter’s coworkers succinctly put it, “You can do everything right and still have bedbugs. Keywords: action; actors; agency; american; bedbugs; coworkers; ends; harm; haven; human; new; participants; people; peter; professionals; social; thinking; university; work; workers
• The Tragic Denouement of English Sociality by Miller, Daniel (2015) - Village people don’t come and visit me ‘cos they never have.” Yet equally common is the opposite response, which leads English people to feel that it would be especially intrusive to interfere in what is an intimate and private matter. Keywords: community; english; evidence; family; friends; hospice; isolation; kinship; london; media; narrative; patients; people; sociality; village
• Anticipatory States: Tsunami, War, and Insecurity in Sri Lanka by Choi, Vivian Y. (2015) - It was July, the season for the annual Kataragama festival and the Pada Yatra, an annual walking pilgrimage that starts in May in northeastern Sri Lanka and ends in July in Kataragama, a city in southeastern Sri Lanka famed for its multi-faith temples and festivals. For the people I knew in eastern Sri Lanka, the possibility of a disastrous future depended on what they knew and had experienced in the past. Keywords: anticipation; disaster; government; lanka; ltte; management; nation; national; new; people; press; risk; security; sri; sri lanka; state; tamil; tsunami; university; war; warning
• The Currency of Failure: Money and Middle-Class Critique in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires by Muir, Sarah (2015) - As with other financial crises, the shifting grounds of social life elicited commentaries that comprehended those shifts as incomprehensible. Post-crisis Buenos Aires was a place, it should be emphasized, where suspicious interpretation constituted a common social practice, not only in interviews with U.S. anthropologists but also in newspaper editorials, radio programs, dinner party conversations, and all manner of formal and informal media. Keywords: aires; argentina; buenos; class; country; crisis; critique; currency; devaluation; dollar; loss; middle; money; new; peg; people; peso; press; public; self; social; university; value; world
• Errance and Elsewheres among Africans Waiting to Restart Their Journeys in Dakar, Senegal by Echeverri Zuluaga, Jonathan (2015) - Later on, during the colonial period, division between French and British territories carved corridors and imposed barriers for movement, at times favoring movement within colonies, and at other times movement across them. Suspension also appears as narratives of other times and spaces that translate into an emptying of the present: doomsday prophecies among evangelicals that turn the near future into a time in which action to transform current living conditions is not encouraged (Guyer 2007); stories shared among youth about lands with greener pastures located beyond the African continent (Melly 2011); or feelings influenced by religion about ejection from a space of life and a sense of being thrown into an “out-of-this-world” temporality (Pandolfo 2007, 347–48). Keywords: africans; country; dakar; destination; errance; home; interlocutors; jim; journeys; life; money; movement; people; place; press; states; time; travel; university; visa
• “Where there is fire, there is politics”: Ungovernability and Material Life in Urban South Africa by Chance, Kerry Ryan (2015) - Official statistics suggest that shack fires happen ten times per day throughout the country, with one death resulting every other day. In Abahlali-affiliated settlements, shack fires are the subject of summits and gatherings attended by thousands. Keywords: abahlali; africa; anc; apartheid; burning; chicago; community; electricity; fire; kennedy; liberation; life; members; new; people; politics; poor; power; press; residents; road; settlements; shack; south; state; university; university press; urban
• Rule by Good People: Health Governance and the Violence of Moral Authority in Thailand by Funahashi, Daena Aki (2015) - BIOMEDICAL UNIVERSALISM AND ITS ANTIPOLITICS In looking at how HiAP as a global movement enabled Thai conservative health experts to position themselves as good people unmoved by national party politics, I build on anthropological examinations of how interventions made in the name of humanitarian and/or biomedical necessity nonetheless deploy their own political and moral reasoning (Fassin 2011; Pandolfi 2003; Ticktin 2011). In Thailand, the HiAP initiative as a legal mandate gave health experts jurisdiction over all aspects of public policymaking that affected national well-being. Keywords: democracy; dharma; experts; good; governance; health; hiap; knowledge; new; panya; people; politics; power; public; tch; thai; thailand; thaksin; yok
• Herding Species: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig by Blanchette, Alex (2015) - The indoor confinement of farm animals is itself often justified in the face of the viral threat of unpredictable contact with beings such as wild geese, whose risky biologies make for key natural reservoirs of zoonotic disease (Fearnley 2015). Senior managers repeated an identical stock phrase whenever I asked them to define their role: “We work on the Herd,” they would claim, “while hourly employees and farm managers work with the Herd.” Keywords: animal; barns; biosecurity; disease; factory; farm; forms; health; herd; hog; human; industrial; labor; life; managers; new; people; pigs; porcine; pork; press; production; region; species; university; work; workers
• An Anthropology of Electricity from the Global South by Gupta, Akhil (2015) - We thus have to reimagine electricity use in the future that does not simply seek to extend the patterns of the present. The centrality of lighting has meant that the biopolitical project has been especially visible in the form taken by electricity infrastructures. Keywords: electricity; energy; global; grid; india; life; people; power; quality; south; supply; use
• Tentacles of Modernity: Why Electricity Needs Anthropology by Winther, Tanja; Wilhite, Harold (2015) - Electricity is also associated with the provider, normally the state, and the arrival of electricity affects the state-citizen relationship in crucial ways. In Uroa electricity strengthened the standing of Islam, the villagers’ religious practices, and their affiliation with global Islamic networks (Winther 2008). Keywords: development; electricity; electrification; energy; new; people; time; uroa; village
• Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rogue Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ by Kim, Eleana J. (2016) - The normalization of this militarized citizenship became, in the course of Mr. Lee’s testimony, closely tied to a vision of the United States as a rogue power, articulated in a forceful critique of Bill Clinton’s ignorance of U.S. mines existing in areas outside of the DMZ. Now, instead of being no-go zones or abject wastelands, minefields had transformed into tantalizing spaces of human crossing, predicated on an understanding of mines as actants whose agency could be anticipated and even overcome. Keywords: agency; area; border; ccz; cheongjeon; dmz; human; kim; korean; landmines; lee; military; mines; nature; people; residents; rogue; south; state; u.s; victims; war
• Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters by Archambault, Julie Soleil (2016) - In other words, what plant lovers emphasized was not so much the transgression of a discrete sphere of exchange (Ferguson 1990; Shipton 1989) as the reaffirmation of a personal stance, one driven by an affective connection with plants that was experienced and imagined as based on true love and that therefore precluded seeing plants for their commercial value. In the rare cases when plant lovers did end up exchanging plants for money, they turned to the language of the gift to palliate this transgression. Keywords: affective; anthropology; commodification; encounters; gardeners; gardening; human; inhambane; intimacy; kenneth; love; lovers; men; new; people; plants; press; relations; university
• A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America by Kilroy-Marac, Katie (2016) - In his introduction to The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai (1986, 5) shook material objects from the tree of anthropological convention by challenging the discipline’s “tendency to excessively sociologize transactions in things.” A seemingly simple question had led me to seek out and talk to POs in Toronto: how, in North America and at this particular historical moment, are we to manage and be with our ever-expanding world of material things? Keywords: clients; disorder; hoarding; life; material; new; north; objects; organizers; people; pos; press; stuff; things; university; work
• The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn: Reparative Futures at a French Political Protest by Thorkelson, Eli (2016) - The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn The Infinite Rounds of the Stubborn: Reparative Futures at a French Political Protest ELI THORKELSON Whittier College http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4409-3301 If futures are always plural, then we might reasonably expect that any given cultural formation of the future is in dialogue with other futures, or in conflict with them.1 Gustav Peebles (2008, 238), in an analysis of the nationalist politics of paper currency, has suggested that “the state, long recognized as a colonizer both of the past and of physical territory . . . Or can futures be decolonized, as it were? Keywords: anthropology; form; french; future; government; hope; march; marchers; new; paris; people; politics; press; public; ronde; social; space; state; stubbornness; time; university
• Humanitarian Care and the Ends of Life: The Politics of Aging and Dying in a Palestinian Refugee Camp by Feldman, Ilana (2017) - To be sure, there are many sources of constraint on Palestinian lives. This abandonment of Palestinian life can be understood in biopolitical terms as disallowing life “to the point of death” (Foucault 1990, 138).27 But Palestinians mostly do not feel generically disregarded, but targeted as political subjects.28 They have demands, for both services and sovereignty, and view the abandonment of Palestinian subjects as a project to undermine their capacity to press these claims. Keywords: camp; care; conditions; death; dying; experience; health; humanitarian; lebanon; life; lives; palestine; palestinians; people; refugees; services; unrwa
• Consent’s Revenge by Simpson, Audra (2016) - That context includes a settler suspicion of Indigenous peoples, and at times, as we saw during the so-called Oka Crisis of 1990, a deep hatred for Mohawks.5 How then to describe or theorize that which is cognizant of its own space of articulation? Indigenous peoples are grappling with the fiction of justice while pushing for justice. Keywords: consent; land; people; political; press; refusal; settler; university
• Who’s Queer? What’s Queer? Queer Anthropology through the Lens of Ethnography by Lewin, Ellen (2016) - As I later considered Weston’s findings, which are very solidly grounded in ethnographic investigation but which mainly focus on gay people who are not parents, I could only conclude that parenthood changed the meaning of kinship for gay and lesbian people from the emphasis on the chosen-families model to something much more similar to what nongay people who had children embraced. Queer Anthropology through the Lens of Ethnography ELLEN LEWIN University of Iowa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2911-0628 I would like to use this space to explore the utility of queer nomenclature for understanding the lives of many real-world people with nonheteronormative sexual or gender identities and presentations, asking whether a field of inquiry many choose to label as “queer anthropology” can adequately represent the full diversity of the populations we study. Keywords: anthropology; gay; gender; lesbian; mothers; people; queer; women
• Auto-Construction Redux: The City as Method by Corsín Jiménez, Alberto (2017) - Cities 1, no. 6: 575–79. They have provided a conceptual sensibility for framing the messy entanglements of material energies, affective relations, political capacities, and social creativity that make up city life. Keywords: auto; campo; city; community; construction; dazzle; holston; learning; madrid; method; new; people; periphery; self; slum; social; space; specific; story; theory; urban; urbanism
• Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity by Kunreuther, Laura (2018) - In many philosophical discussions of democracy, metaphors of political voice almost always refer to discursive speech, analytic or reasoned discourse. Crowds on the street and noise are typically juxtaposed with a silent and rational reading public, and both are disavowed in discussions about political voice. Keywords: activists; ashmina; baluwatar; crying; democracy; kathmandu; media; nepal; new; noise; occupy; people; performance; politics; press; protest; public; radio; silence; sound; university; voice; āwāj
• What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City by Roberts, Elizabeth F. S. (2017) - Colonia Periférico residents tell of shopping-mall developers coming around a few years ago, but losing interest because of the stench and reputation. Like most Colonia Periférico residents I know, she is concerned with living well in the reality she inhabits. Keywords: boundaries; city; colonia; colonia periférico; dam; drugs; entanglement; health; inside; life; mexico; nati; people; periférico; police; press; public; señora; soda; university; war; water; world
• Affective Atmospheres of Terror on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Rumors of Violence in Reynosa’s Prostitution Zone by Luna, Sarah (2018) - Rumors like the one Eva narrated have shaped affective atmospheres of terror, especially as Reynosa has become further militarized by the Mexican state in what was officially an attempt to combat narco-trafficking and its attendant torture, killings, and threats.3 As Reynosa residents spread rumors of violence, borders between narco-controlled territory and state-controlled territory shifted in and through their bodies. The second part of my discussion examines how Reynosa residents generally, and sex workers specifically, changed their spatial practices in response to both affective atmospheres of terror and the content of rumors. Keywords: affective; bodies; border; drug; eva; fear; mexico; missionaries; narco; organizations; people; power; press; reynosa; rumors; sex; sex workers; stories; terror; university; violence; workers
• “It’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing”: Slow Violence and the Manipulation of Time by Ahmann, Chloe (2018) - Without disputing these scholars’ observations (on which my own analysis is partially dependent), I offer a different set of tools—tools that, beyond depicting time and perceptibility as mechanisms of social control, also specify how those hamstrung by slow violence work time to alter their conditions. Beginning in the 1800s, factories concentrated in Curtis Bay thanks to land-use regulations that pushed nuisances (waste, industry, contagious disease) to the urban periphery. Keywords: attention; baltimore; bay; campaign; curtis; december; effects; environmental; events; history; incinerator; mde; new; people; press; project; residents; response; state; time; university; violence; work; years
• Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin by Stoetzer, Bettina (2018) - The life cycles of sticky goosefoot and other plants revealed that Berlin, like other cities, had become hotter (Sukopp and Wurzel 2003, 70). As in many other cities across Europe, public discourse and policy located the source of these inequalities in migrants themselves,10 especially in their presumed lack of economic productivity and sense of disconnection, which leaves traces of dereliction in the urban landscape—for example, by barbecuing in the city’s parks and leaving garbage behind.11 Metaphors of parallel worlds and social hot spots (soziale Brennpunkte) emphasize a sense of lurking danger: the danger of fire breaking loose, the threat of wilderness imposing itself on the civilized city. Keywords: anthropology; berlin; cities; city; ecologies; ecology; environments; europe; garden; gecekondu; human; infrastructure; life; nation; nature; new; osman; people; plants; press; rubble; ruderal; ruins; university; war; york
• “It smells like a thousand angels marching”: The Salvific Sensorium in Rio de Janeiro’s Western Subúrbios by Denyer Willis, Laurie (2018) - The salvific sensorium wafts, hardens, dissipates, and returns, dependent on a multitude of spatial sensations, distinctions, and tangible things like waste fragrance and recycled bottles. Pentecostals in Rio’s western subúrbios often think of waste fragrance as a way that God, via divine gifts of grace, enters homes and lives and enables a different conception of life (Denyer Willis 2017; cf. Keywords: 2015; american; anthropology; body; divine; experience; fragrance; god; milene; new; people; press; rio; sensorium; smell; space; subúrbios; university; university press; waste; water; work
• Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present by Lempert, William (2018) - Such projects provide immersive platforms for addressing the structural silencing of Aboriginal futures through critical mediations on how and, just as importantly, when Indigenous people are imagined. Indigenous futures are not only vital for Aboriginal people; they also provide valuable insight into global challenges. Keywords: aboriginal; communities; dunba; film; future; hope; media; people; present
• A Politics of Habitability: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World by Langwick, Stacey Ann (2018) - TRMEGA garden, as viewed upon entering the compound at Maji ya Chai. Statistics on the market and on industry growth, however, do not capture the work of TRMEGA gardens or elucidate their alliances with food sovereignty movements. Keywords: africa; bodies; dawa; food; gardens; healing; health; human; life; new; nguya; people; plants; politics; press; relations; spaces; support; tanzania; therapeutic; toxicity; trmega; university; ways; work
• Exploration or Algorithm? The Undone Science Before the Algorithms by Nafus, Dawn (2018) - So much for data science as an esoteric skill only relevant to the privileged. The instances of travel that brought oxygen into someone’s bloodstream, or the construction sounds that distressed an Alzheimer’s sufferer and her daughter, will never be found in an armchair version of data science. Keywords: algorithm; data; design; people; science; value
• What Should an Anthropology of Algorithms Do? by Seaver, Nick (2018) - We can readily see how the worlds of reference of the people working within algorithmic systems—what they anticipate and are sensitive to, their habitus and common sense—come to matter in those systems’ functioning, and thus how diversity in these settings is not only a matter of equitable representation but also one of functional, technical consequence (see Noble 2018). Whether that made anthropology a complementary counterpart or a perfectly positioned antagonist to algorithmic systems, our role was determined in advance by the very phenomenon we set out to study (Seaver 2015). Keywords: algorithms; analog; anthropology; brad; human; new; people; press; software; systems
• The Limits of Dwelling and the Unwitnessed Death by Danely, Jason (2019) - Scams often promise to make older homes fit for older persons considering a future where they will need more supportive modifications, and so home improvement becomes a means of asserting autonomy over aging, even as it leaves them more vulnerable to predatory schemes. “There are a lot of old people that live down there. Keywords: ambulance; care; community; death; dwelling; family; home; houses; japan; japanese; kodokushi; life; living; minseiiin; people; person; san; society; solo
• The Subject of Wrongs: Crime, Populism, and Venezuela’s Punitive Turn by Samet, Robert (2019) - Most of the scholarship on this subject assumes that crime victims are passive, fearful creatures.12 At least in theory high rates of violent crime should have gone hand in hand with a retreat from public space, a distrust of strangers, a demobilization of the populace, and a defensive posture toward the future. It was in this capacity, as subjects of wrong, that crime victims fulfilled a symbolic function not unlike charisma. Keywords: america; anthropology; chávez; crime; government; latin; new; people; politics; populism; president; press; project; security; social; spear; state; suffering; turn; university; venezuela; victimhood; victims; wrongs; york
• The Afterlife of Gender: Sovereignty, Intimacy and Muslim Funerals of Transgender People in Turkey by Zengin, Aslı (2019) - To understand the alliance between blood families and the state, we must first unpack state and Islamic regulations behind death rituals and practices of mourning in Turkey, both of which define the blood family as the primary holder of obligations for and rights to the deceased. Blood families and spouses have de facto sovereignty over these decisions, unless a will exists that specifies particular death rights and practices. Keywords: blood; blood family; body; burial; dead; death; deceased; family; friends; funeral; gender; life; people; sex; sibel; sovereignty; state; trans; transgender; turkey; women
• Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine by Meneley, Anne (2019) - Setting out to walk along the Separation Wall, the British comedian Mark Thomas (2011) describes his interaction with Shatha Group walkers who view their walking endeavors as an effort to escape from the infrastructures of control.6 Shehadeh wrote a brief introduction to Walking Palestine: Twenty-Five Journeys into the West Bank, a guidebook by Stefan Szepesi (2012), while working with Tony Blair’s Office of the Quartet on facilitating the now defunct peace process. The joint foreigners/Palestinians group he started, called Walking Palestine, now has considerably more than the initial two hundred members. Keywords: bank; body; checkpoint; east; father; fitbit; israel; jerusalem; land; life; palestine; palestinian; people; press; self; shehadeh; steps; surveillance; walking; walks; way; west
• A Disarmament Program for Witches: The Prospective Politics of Antiwitchcraft, Postwarcraft, and Rebrandcraft in Sierra Leone by Anderson, Samuel Mark (2019) - Yet to dismiss such sweeping conjunctions as mere bombast would be to discount Kabba’s skill for integrating local and foreign languages of power, a vital art in contemporary Sierra Leone. In 2010, he orchestrated a spectacular launching ceremony during which Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma presented him with a staff of authority akin to that of a paramount chief, enabling Kabba to claim that the post was his for life. Keywords: brand; chicago; ddr; disarmament; government; healers; international; kabba; leone; new; people; power; press; public; rebranding; sierra; sierra leone; slithu; state; transformation; union; university; violence; witch; witchcraft; witches
• Speculative Fields: Property in the Shadow of Post-Conflict Colombia by Morris, Meghan L. (2019) - The time, however, was also one of war on many levels, from processes of land possession and dispossession like those on Cristina and Ernesto’s farm, to daily news of paramilitary death threats, guerrilla violence, narco-trafficking, and political corruption. People reworked historical forms of land possession to negotiate the uncertainties around these regimes—and, more broadly, the space between war and peace in which they proliferated. Keywords: claim; colombia; conflict; farmers; future; land; landholders; past; peace; people; plot; possession; post; property; restitution; shadow; speculation; state; title; urabá; violence; war
• What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic by Moran-Thomas, Amy (2019) - She was trying hard to train others, since no one in this southern district of Belize—which also had no endocrinologist or podiatrist—had received specialty training in diabetes foot care. Long after she officially retired, Nurse Elizabeth had kept going to the hospital to help with diabetes foot care. Keywords: amputation; belize; care; communicable; diabetes; diabetic; disease; elizabeth; feet; foot; grace; health; hyperbaric; injuries; limb; new; non; patients; people; percent; press; public; team; time; university; world; york
• On Cynicism: Activist and Artistic Responses to Corruption in Ghana by Daswani, Girish (2020) - In reference to Fela Kuti’s 1978 musical performance in Accra (especially his song “Zombie”), Bright stated that it was music that “inspired the audience to hit the street and riot against what was then very corrupt practices in Ghana government.” For Wanlov, postcolonial Ghana reincarnated colonial evils that had never been fully expelled. Keywords: activism; activists; artists; bright; change; class; corruption; cynicism; dey; ghana; ghanaians; golda; good; government; occupyghana; people; politics; power; press; protest; state; university; wanlov; work
• Care and Conveyance: Buying Baladi Bread in Cairo by Barnes, Jessica; Taher, Mariam (2019) - The bread the customer is purchasing is a particular kind of bread, known as baladi bread, which is subsidized by the government and eaten by the majority of Egyptians (according to the government’s statistics, around 85 percent) on a daily basis (see figure 1).2 The card the customer hands over is a ration card, which entitles him to five loaves of baladi bread a day for each member of his family. Keywords: bag; bakeries; bakery; baladi; baladi bread; booth; bread; care; customer; egypt; fayza; food; good; government; handling; home; loaves; mariam; people; practices; quality; university; woman
• Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism by Laidlaw, James; Mair, Jonathan (2019) - Fo Guang Shan practice clearly constitutes an ethical project in this sense. FO GUANG SHAN AND HUMANISTIC BUDDHISM Based in Taiwan but global in reach, Fo Guang Shan claims around two million registered members and more than two hundred temples in twenty-nine countries worldwide. Keywords: anthropology; buddhism; cultivation; ethical; ethics; guang; guang shan; life; monastic; new; participants; people; practice; preceptees; press; retreat; ritual; self; shan; taiwan; university
• Ethnography in a Shell Game: Turtles All the Way Down in Abidjan by Newell, Sasha (2019) - Dedy, at the center of my fieldwork in 2001, had been a tautly muscled man always ready to leap physically into an argument between strangers in hopes of making some money or at least an ally from the underdog whom he always defended. Boniface qualified himself as a “boss,” or upper class, while Dedy no longer had a home, but both were among my most trusted friends, people I had relied on during my earlier fieldwork to protect me from being conned, robbed, or otherwise harmed. Keywords: abidjan; boniface; chicago; deception; dedy; frame; issa; money; narrative; new; newell; officer; opacity; people; police; press; scam; situation; social; story; university; way
• Appearances of Disability and Christianity in Uganda by Zoanni, Tyler (2019) - These comparisons bring into view the different modes of disability appearance that L’Arche and SCT foster, while underlining something they share: the construal of people with cognitive disabilities as “children,” as Maimuna herself put it above. Even as Christian paternalism in the face of cognitive disability may prove repugnant to a liberal vision of disability politics, I argue that it sustains a form of disability appearance otherwise not possible in Uganda. Keywords: appearance; arendt; children; christian; disabilities; disability; efforts; forms; life; l’arche; maimuna; new; nudipu; organizations; people; persons; politics; press; public; representation; sct; self; studies; uganda; university
• Birthing from Within: Nature, Technology, and Self-Making in Silicon Valley Childbearing by Ford, Andrea (2020) - My decision to use gender-neutral terms in my analytic voice marks not only a political stance, in solidarity with trans/queer politics and to avoid reifying birth as an essential component of womanhood, but a reflection of the gender-neutral virtues that inform Silicon Valley birth culture. Designing the Innate Jasmine’s Birthing from Within course exemplified the pragmatic idealism of Silicon Valley birth culture by critiquing medically managed birth while taking advantage of its presence. Keywords: birth; birthing; body; california; childbearing; culture; doula; jasmine; knowing; knowledge; labor; making; nature; new; people; person; press; primordial; self; silicon; silicon valley; technology; university; valley; women
• The Work of Disaster: Building Back Otherwise in Post-Earthquake Nepal by Seale-Feldman, Aidan (2020) - This would become a problem for humanitarian mental health interventions in the aftermath of the earthquake, which had to contend with the fact that they would be providing people with brief access to care in regions that otherwise did not have such resources regularly available. From 2014 to 2016, I conducted fieldwork on global mental health and psychosocial transformations in Nepal, living and working among small farming communities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for mental health and counseling, psychiatrists, psychosocial counselors, and development and humanitarian aid workers. Keywords: anthropology; bina; building; care; counseling; crisis; development; disaster; earthquake; event; group; health; humanitarian; intervention; life; nepal; new; people; press; suffering; time; university; work; world
• Populist Becoming: The Red Shirt Movement and Political Affliction in Thailand by Seo, Bo Kyeong (2019) - Thongchai Winichakul’s (2010) vivid description written at the height of the protest captures the sense of horror projected onto Red Shirt protesters. 16. As this event exhibits both the voluntary and induced aspects of the Red Shirts’ mobilization,9 people’s emotional attachment to the plutocrat confirms the criticism that they are not proper liberal citizen subjects who embody the democratic ideals of deliberative participation.10 In the Bangkok-centered elite view, this staged manifestation of trust and longing for Thaksin proves the conviction that Red Shirt supporters are credulous rural masses lacking sophistication or civil competence. Keywords: bangkok; chiang; crowd; democracy; democratic; food; life; mai; military; movement; new; people; politics; populist; protest; red; sense; shirts; thai; thailand; thaksin
• Structures of Resentment: On Feeling—and Being—Left Behind by Health Care Reform by Mulligan, Jessica M.; Brunson, Emily K. (2020) - It is these less visible and less spectacular machinations of white rage that we call resentment policies. Resentment emotions solidify into resentment policies (which in turn fuel more resentment emotions) when elected officials and private actors (like corporations) promulgate rules, programs, and eligibility criteria that limit access to social services and public goods to only those deemed “deserving”; impose burdens and costs on eligible beneficiaries that discourage the uptake of services; naturalize inequalities and make them seem inevitable; and shame or vilify those in need of services, thereby transforming our interdependencies into “burdens.” Keywords: aca; access; allison; care; coverage; florida; health; health care; insurance; law; medicaid; new; people; policies; policy; reform; resentment; sharon; state; structures; violet; white; york
• Mining Leftovers: Making Futures on the Margins of Capitalism by Jaramillo, Pablo (2020) - Amid the risks caused by insecurity and crisis, small-scale miners create a sense of future through their affective (and always material) engagement with the leftovers of gold mining, feeding their own lives in the margins of global financial capitalism. At the same time, they all try to come to terms with the fact that bureaucrats, large-scale mining companies, and the leaders of other social movements that oppose gold mining deem their lives outdated, impossible, and futureless. Keywords: company; conchos; extraction; future; gases; gold; leftovers; life; marmato; mineral; miners; mining; people; process; rubble; scale; scale miners; scale mining; sense; time; town; way
• Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South by Bloch, Leigh (2020) - Pvlvcekolv people, like Indigenous people elsewhere, are concerned about the threat of cultural loss. Wary of assimilating Indigenous peoples into a “shared now” of modernity defined by colonial encompassment, Rifkin is interested in other kinds of time. Keywords: american; ancestors; archaeology; bloch; care; community; futures; landscapes; life; mound; native; new; people; place; power; practices; press; pvlvcekolv; ruins; settler; site; states; time; university
• Biopolitical Paternalism and Its Maternal Supplements: Kinship Correlates of Community Mental Health Governance in China by Ma, Zhiying (2020) - They are intensely uncomfortable with aspects of institutionalization, such as the crowded ward, the physical discomfort, the staff’s neglect, possible bullying from other patients, and so on. Aimed at building a nationwide mental health infrastructure that extends beyond psychiatric hospitals and reaches patients living at home, the 686 Program trains general practitioners and nurses to visit patients regularly, monitor their symptoms and risks of violence, and offer them necessary treatment. Keywords: caregivers; china; cmhps; community; confinement; family; governance; health; home; management; members; mental; paternalism; patients; people; practices; program; public; state
• Underlayers of Citizenship: Queer Objects, Intimate Exposures, and the Rescue Rush in Kenya by Meiu, George Paul (2020) - The strong capacity of diaper discourses to evoke a simultaneous destruction of bodies and polities made them appealing as a means to govern sexuality through moral panics. What makes diaper discourses so evocative in the present? Keywords: african; bodies; citizenship; diapers; discourses; homosexual; kenya; leaders; life; men; national; people; press; progress; public; rumors; sex; sexuality; university; women; work; workers
• Jurisprudential Massage: Legal Fictions, Sectarian Citizenship, and the Epistemics of Dissent in Post-socialist China by Pia, Andrea E. (2020) - Legal mediation works the same way. Dispute mediation eases the mounting governmental frustration with judicial litigation while providing disgruntled citizens with a first venue of extrajudicial redress. Keywords: 2013; cases; china; citizenship; contemporary; disputants; dispute; dissent; fictions; justice; law; massage; mediation; mediators; oxford; party; people; press; resolution; rules; stability; state; university
• Magendo: Arbitrage and Ambiguity on an East African Frontier by Donovan, Kevin P. (2021) - This impermanence allowed Kenyan frontier residents to mediate exchange between the brief visits of Ugandans and the bulk exporters of magendo coffee from Kenya. Others turned to cooperative agricultural societies, using their collectively held cash as an advance to purchase magendo coffee. Keywords: african; arbitrage; border; buyers; chepkube; chicago; coffee; day; economy; frontier; kenya; magendo; market; money; new; night; people; period; press; residents; time; trade; uganda; ugandans; university; wealth
• Habilitating Bodyminds, Caring for Potential: Disability Therapeutics after Zika in Bahia, Brazil by Williamson, Eliza (2024) - While some have emphasized how biomedical therapeutic technologies like disaggregated, synthetic birth-control hormones, become modalities of self-care, bodymind enhancement, and even social mobility, scant attention has been paid to technologies of (re)habilitation for children, much less for disabled children (cf. In large part, the importance of such intervention was framed as an investment in the country’s future, since advocates argued that in the long term, disabled children would become not just unproductive citizens but financial burdens on the state (Lobo 2009, 374). Keywords: anthropology; bahia; bodyminds; brain; brazil; bruno; care; children; development; disability; future; habilitative; health; intervention; lizinha; maria; mothers; parents; people; potential; press; rehabilitation; sara; technologies; time; university; work; zika
• Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border by Sur, Malini (2020) - Yet cattle times are controlled not by bovine life cycles, but by the actions of affluent, “animal tax” paying Bangladeshi traders who demand cattle in a hurry and Bangladeshi troops who legalize cattle. These values are fundamental to pastoral and agrarian life, and by sustaining marginal communities in the borderland chars, they remain intrinsic to the experience of border times. Keywords: alibaba; animals; assam; bangladesh; bangladesh border; border; cattle; chand; chars; clear; cow; india; national; new; people; press; signal; smuggling; state; time; traders; troops; university; violence; workers
• Work without Labor: Life in the Surround of a Rural Prison Town by Pearson, Heath (2021) - While Gilmore’s study remains persuasive, there is a problem with viewing Cliptown prisons as a fix: it suggests, even if unintentionally, that prisons are an external technology to the function of state and capital. site of aggressively one-sided, racial gendered warfare,” and on Cedric J. Robinson’s (2007, xii) “racial regimes,” which are “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power,” I reframe Cliptown prisons as only the current manifestation of sites that mystify and legitimate white-masculinist warfare through the continual adaptation of technologies of confinement that enable the political economy to function. Keywords: black; cliptown; confinement; jersey; labor; land; life; new; people; police; prison; regime; seabrook; shakes; space; spot; state; structure; technologies; work; workers; york
• Plants, Pathogens, and the Politics of Care: Xylella fastidiosa and the Intra-active Breakdown of Mallorca’s Almond Ecology by Reisman, Emily (2021) - MODERNIST CARE: Irrigated Hopes In 2018, irrigation was emerging as a new form of almond tree care, an act once considered unthinkable for such a drought-resistant species. The hillsides beyond were dotted with a contrast of vibrant carob trees and decaying almond trees navigated by a small flock of sheep. Keywords: agriculture; almond; anthropology; care; change; disease; epidemic; farmers; fastidiosa; human; intra; island; landscape; maintenance; mallorca; ministry; new; people; plant; politics; press; relations; spain; tourism; trees; university; water; work; xylella; years
• Pedagogies of Prohibition: Time, Education, and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte by Fogarty-Valenzuela, Benjamin (2022) - This article attempts to comprehend such solutions, paying particular attention to the way they marry pedagogy with efforts to enforce drug prohibition. In this sense, it departs from a widespread consensus across much of the literature on youth governance and drug prohibition in urban Brazil and across the Americas that focuses, for good reason, on the spatial dimensions of governance. Keywords: anthropology; brazil; class; day; desocupação; drug; education; life; norte; pedagogies; pedagogy; people; police; press; prohibition; public; punctuality; rodrigo; school; social; students; time; tropa; university; war; way; work; young; youth
• Critical Security and Anthropology from the Middle East by El Dardiry, Giulia; Hermez, Sami (2020) - Security seems to interact in varied and mismatched ways with daily life in a region overdetermined by security discourse. Second, the pervasiveness and intensity of security discourses in academia and the world at large make a direct and explicit engagement with the concept necessary, even—and perhaps especially—if one’s aim is to ultimately move beyond it. Keywords: anthropology; east; in)security; life; middle; people; security; state
• Security against the State in Revolutionary Yemen by Porter, Ross (2020) - The revolutionary individual, in this case, is the self-empowered object of state securitization. For a Crisis of Politics Considering the importance attached to safeguarding the revolutionary present against the specter of the past, and specifically a past in which state securitization had been dressed in politically neutralizing garb (e.g., “stability”), it seems hardly surprising that calls by international mediators for reconciliation, dialogue, and negotiation (“political solutions”) fell on deaf ears. Keywords: people; revolution; revolutionaries; securitization; security; state
• Trust without Confidence: Moving Medicine with Dirty Hands by Rubaii, Kali (2020) - Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, as well as the author’s participation in this network, the essay introduces enunciatory trust, or trust without confidence, as an analytical framework for surviving (in)security in Iraq. Enunciatory trust is a prevailing way in which insecurity makes material conditions for endurance possible: when trust is not a feeling or a structure, one acts and speaks as if one feels trust, simply because it is necessary. Keywords: medication; nanoor; network; people; trust
• Banking on Digital Money: Swedish Cashlessness and the Fraying Currency Tether by Peebles, Gustav (2021) - The former serve as “banks” for central bank money, whereas the latter serve as banks for commercial bank money. In other words, the dangerous irony of the e-krona could be that it would finally cause the citizenry to start noticing the difference between central bank money and commercial bank money that lies at the heart of national money’s misrecognition mechanism as described above (see also, e.g., Sparbankernas Riksförbund 2018, 2). Keywords: bank; banking; cash; central; credit; currency; debt; infrastructure; krona; money; national; new; payment; people; press; public; riksbank; state; sweden; swedish; system; university
• Vengeful Animals, Involuntary Mourning, and the Ethics of Ndyuka Autonomy by Strange, Stuart Earle (2021) - Ndyuka animal kunu consequently lend witness to a human obligation to “hold open space in the world for other living beings” (Van Dooren 2014, 33). Animal kunu, the subject of this article, terrorize those to whom they attribute their unjust deaths, thereby forcing Ndyukas to recognize that humans are neither uniquely aware of death nor capable of exerting the “control over mortality” (Mbembe 2003, 12) at the heart of dominant Euro-American political-economic practice. Keywords: animals; autonomy; collective; death; den; ethics; family; forest; grief; human; kunu; life; mourning; ndyuka; people; press; relations; responsibility; snake; spirits; university
• Not Built to Last: Military Occupation and Ruination under Settler Colonialism by Weiss, Joseph (2021) - Former Haida Base employees with whom I spoke expressed to me their frustrations with friends and family who didn’t understand their choice of employment or, even more distressingly, resented the financial benefits and privileged forms of access that military employment brought. One of the most dramatic and yet simultaneously most intimate consequences of the sustained presence of military officers were the relationships—and sometimes marriages—that developed between military personnel, their families, and Haida community members. Keywords: base; colonial; communities; community; gwaii; haida; haida gwaii; land; masset; military; occupation; people; personnel; presence; press; settler; territory; time; university; violence
• Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa by Hardin, Jessica (2021) - DOI: 10.14506/ca36.3.08 LIFE BEFORE VEGETABLES: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa JESSICA HARDIN Rochester Institute of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5340-2933 Proverbs 15:17 Better to eat vegetables with people you love than to eat the finest meat where there is hate. Reflecting global efforts directed by the World Health Organization and the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization to prevent conditions like diabetes, vegetable consumption has come to play a starring role in Samoan public health materials as the only means of combating chronic sickness. Keywords: cash; consumption; families; family; food; global; hardin; health; household; land; life; meal; new; nutrition; pacific; people; plantation; press; relations; samoa; subjunctive; tanu; university; university press; vailea; vegetables
• Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation by Seaver, Nick (2021) - Care work is necessary to produce any sort of world, not only the ones we might deem desirable. Like Whitman’s decorrelation of care from scale, this transformation opens up a space of analytic possibility: it makes it possible to see care in sites of violence or harm, like rape crisis centers (Mulla 2014), and to recognize that locations full of good feeling may be careless, such as international circuits of care work that exclude and oppress (Murphy 2015).7 It has also facilitated studies of care that leave the prototypical dyadic scenes of caring and follow care “across many scales and dimensions” (Mattern 2018): caring for ecosystems, populations, or infrastructures (Stevenson 2014; Bocci 2017; Ishii 2017). Keywords: care; companies; company; data; decorrelation; ethics; figure; human; huron; music; new; people; press; recommendation; scale; systems; values; vectors; whitman; work; world; yams
• Oikography: Ethnographies of House-ing in Critical Times by Biehl, João; Neiburg, Federico (2021) - Houses are thus treated both in the singular (because peoples operate with the concept of the house or my home, and ideas of singularity and belonging matter) and in the plural (because lives happen along and among houses and because houses territorialize political collectives). Oikography essays explore the reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity: the 2010 Haitian earthquake and cholera outbreak, racialized police violence in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, malarial control in impoverished Tanzanian communities, the irradiated post-Fukushima Japan, and the displacement of Amazonian communities by a hydroelectric dam. Keywords: anthropology; casas; home; house; ing; material; new; oikography; oikos; people; space; times; university
• Evasion: Prison Escapes and the Predicament of Incarceration in Rio de Janeiro by Thompson, David (2023) - Such a movement unsettles familiar tropes of prison escapes because it represents neither a heroic dash toward freedom nor a scandalous failure of custody. Although my fieldwork brought me into other prisons designated for men, I never entered Crispim Ventino. Keywords: 2020; apartment; black; brazil; brazilian; diana; escape; evasion; freedom; gender; hillary; imprisonment; incarceration; janeiro; movement; people; prison; project; rio; sentence; state; system; time; trans; university
• Place, Time, and Affect: Changing Landscapes around a New Guinea Mining Area by Jacka, Jerry (2022) - Anxieties about night spirits exemplify a concern with breaches in reciprocity and the consequences of undermining reciprocal exchanges. To this end, I am interested in how the oscillations between day and night have an affective dimension to them and, in turn, how these can inform our understanding of changes in the landscape over time. Keywords: affect; clan; fear; forest; house; men; mining; new; night; people; place; porgera; porgerans; reciprocity; spirits; time; valley; warfare
• Life in Traffic: Riddling Field Notes on the Political Economy of “Sex” and Nature by Goldstein, Ruth (2022) - Resonant with forms of reproductive labor like embryo exchange, sex traffic “between women” exists (Roberts 2012): sex work often funds tuition, schoolbooks, or a family member’s surgery. Mulas, the agent explained, can traffic drugs, gold, or other women—and they might also be the commodity trafficked. Keywords: coca; colonial; dios; earth; economies; economy; exchange; forest; gender; gold; goldstein; highway; human; interoceánica; kuka; life; maca; madre; mines; mining; nature; new; people; peru; plants; press; rain; relations; riddle; road; rubin; sex; traffic; trafficking; university; women; workers
• Suspending Nuclearity: Ecologics of Planting Seeds after the Nuclear Fallout in Fukushima, Japan by Kumaki, Hiroko (2022) - International institutions, the government, and health practitioners have shaped the nuclearity of Fukushima through technoscientific and medical debates on how to detect radiation and assess the potential health effects caused by radiation exposure (FMU 2013; Fukushima Prefecture 2022a; ICRP 2020; Ministry of Environment 2017a, 2017b). Against governmental claims of safety, their practices underscored the health risks of radiation exposure, encouraging separation from anything that had to do with radiation. Keywords: accident; community; ecologics; environment; evacuation; farmers; food; fukushima; health; japan; land; life; nuclear; nuclearity; people; place; projects; radiation; radioactive; relationships; ways
• Spectacle: The Semiotics of Albinism in Tanzania by Saffitz, Jane (2025) - Here I am thinking of lightness neither in terms of whiteness, racial or otherwise (Bashkow 2006; Redfield 2012), nor of relative degrees of weightiness (Munn 1986).5 Rather, lightness evokes illumination and visibility as requisite qualities for seeing, coveted by albinism stakeholders and by healers and extractive laborers. Negative valuations of darkness took on particular significance for albinism stakeholders, many of whom are devout Christians. Keywords: africa; albinism; albino; anthropology; body; darkness; dawa; healers; interventions; lightness; miners; mining; nsembi; nyota; parts; people; practices; press; rights; spectacle; stakeholders; sukuma; tanzania; university; value; violence; yakobo
• Governing by Proximity: State Performance and Migrant Citizenship on the India-Pakistan Border by Raheja, Natasha (2022) - Today, Pakistani Hindu migrants claim Indian citizenship based on their status in Pakistan, where they experience targeted anti-Hindu, casteist exclusion as a religious minority (Jaffrelot 2020; Schaflechner 2020; Mahmood 2014; Yet BJP politicians’ governance by proximity also exposes the distinction between nationalist narrative and substantive recognition for Pakistani Hindu migrants, even while ostensibly seeking to close this gap. Keywords: anthropology; camp; caste; citizenship; digital; face; governance; governing; government; high; hindu; hope; india; jodhpur; journal; migrants; migration; national; new; officers; officials; pakistani; people; performance; politicians; politics; power; press; proximity; recognition; refugee; south; state; university; university press
• When Ethics Can't Be Found: Evaluative Gaps in Ordinary Life by Zuckerman, Charles (2022) - Phòò Thiang’s desire to keep the finances at the funeral “transparent” (cèèng4) also came into evidence in the way he gave Kham money to buy lights for Paa’s casket—he wrote the amount down, made sure he handed the money directly to Kham, and even suggested a store to buy them from. A week later, she told me that although she never called Kham qaaj4 or “older brother,” even though she technically should, she also did not use the dis-honorific title bak2 to Kham’s face. Keywords: anthropology; bòø; claim; ethics; evaluations; face; funeral; gossip; house; kham; life; lights; man2; money; moo; paa; people; phòò; press; salina; signs; sii; thiang; thii; time; university
• From Desire to Endurance: Hanging on in a Spanish Village by Weiss, Hadas (2022) - Jane Collier (1997) wrote that Los Olivos residents and former residents in the 1980s knew they were disadvantaged in the national labor market. Los Olivos residents are hardly typical of the Spanish population at large. Keywords: children; collier; desire; duty; employment; endurance; family; future; house; ideology; jobs; los; olivos; people; property; residents; spain; time; value; villagers; work
• Spectacle, Value, and Basic Income; Or, Labor and the “Maddening State” by McGill, Kenneth (2022) - A basic income monetarily supports activities that cannot be transformed into commodity values through a rationalized inclusion in social state policy. Because they suggest that labor might be more than supplemented by state-led redistribution, basic income policies trouble this arrangement. Keywords: abjection; hartz; income; labor; life; micha; people; protest; public; ralph; spectacle; state; value; way; work
• “As if I Were an Illegal”: Racial Passing in Immigrant Russia by Woodard, Lauren (2022) - As I demonstrate below, many immigrants in Russia cannot pass as white, ethnic Russians; rather, they thwart accusations of illegality by choosing ethnic Russian names, adapting their accent, and changing their clothing to claim Russian citizenship through the multiethnic but still marked category of rossiianin (Russian citizen). In the past thirty years, these debates have been shaped by narratives of ethnic Russian genocide, the reemergence of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the rise of Russian conservatism (Oushakine 2009; Bassin, Glebov, and Laruelle 2015; Suslov and Uzlaner 2019). Keywords: belonging; central; citizenship; compatriots; ethnicity; immigrants; language; maxim; migration; minju; officials; passing; people; post; press; race; russian; russianness; samir; soviet; union; university; white
• Intercorporeal Togetherness: On Russian Blind Activists’ Technology of Disability Inclusion by Borodina, Svetlana (2022) - Lana held several seminars, webinars, and conversations over coffee and WhatsApp with other blind people, where she shared time and again her path to becoming a blind guide:7 how important it was to use a white cane, what kinds of questions she asked, and how she maintained her appearance. A kind and reliable woman with no prior experience of communicating with blind people, Vika responded quickly but used a surprisingly stern tone: “I will help out on one condition: I will drive them wherever you need me to, but do not make me talk to or interact with anyone.” Keywords: activists; alex; blind; bodyminds; disabilities; disability; exclusion; inclusion; inklyuziya; instructors; intercorporeal; making; new; participants; people; person; press; russia; social; students; togetherness; university; university press; work; workshop
• The Pandemic Imaginerie: Infectious Bodies and Military-Police Theater in Australia by Wynn, L. L. (2021) - As Gracie Mae Bradley (2020) wrote in the Guardian, the police enforcement of COVID-19 laws—which the Australian government assured us would be used with “discretion”—necessarily raises the specter of how discretionary enforcement always falls along racial lines. A cluster of infections in a Bondi hostel in late March 2020 led to the neighborhood’s identification as a “hotspot” of COVID-19 transmission. Keywords: anthropology; australia; containment; covid-19; issue; new; pandemic; people; police; social; state
• The End of Intimacy by Strong, Thomas (2021) - The park has been known to gay men for generations as a place for public sex (Colter et al. 1996), and with all other venues for meeting gay men shut down, the park became, for a time, perhaps the most important social space in queer Dublin: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to experience a kind of cognitive whiplash as nearly everyone I met reflected on the politics of contagion and risk in ways that gay men—especially those of us who are HIV-positive—have had to think about for most of our lives. Keywords: covid-19; gay; hiv; lockdown; men; new; people; public; sex; time
• Proxemics, COVID-19, and the Ethics of Care in South Africa by Levine, Susan; Manderson, Lenore (2021) - But how to speak about the unlikely enactment of proxemic rupture across South Africa, without adopting “a sad I expected so much tone,” remains an enduring challenge in writing Africa into anthropology (Wainaina 2005). Ethnographic sensitivity to the relationship between proximity politics and the slow burn of race injustice in South Africa flags how quickly physical distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing has led to changing cultural codes of care along lines of privilege (Ross 2020). Keywords: africa; anthropology; care; covid-19; ethics; health; levine; manderson; people; south; south africa
• Of Feral and Obedient Cows: Colonization as Domestication in the Paraguayan Chaco by Bonifacio, Valentina (2023) - In a similar way, the opposition between local versions of tameness and ferality played a crucial role in shaping ethnic and class boundaries and strategies of domination in the Casado territory. CATTLE AS BIOPOLITICAL POWER By the 1930s, the company town of Puerto Casado had become one of the main centers for tannin production and commercialization in the world, shipping its products mainly to Europe and the United States. That’s something I kept saying: that the people of Casado were anesthetized by Carlos Casado. Keywords: animals; author; beings; carlos; casado; cattle; chaco; colonization; company; cows; domestication; factory; family; feral; forest; human; paraguay; people; puerto; puerto casado; sagua’a; tannin; territory; wild; workers
• Multiscale Home: Shifting Landscapes and Living-in-Movement in Haiti by Neiburg, Federico (2021) - This oikography essay is located at the crossroads of two intellectual traditions: one has shown the vital relational character of Haitian houses (such as the concept of “configuration of houses” in Marcelin Here, conditions of prolonged crisis illuminate people’s resilient house-ing responses at the intersection of two dynamics: the vital relational character of Haitian houses and the necessity of mobility for producing new life. Keywords: daphney; haiti; houses; kay; lakou; people; port; prince; street
• The Dying Home: “Bad Deaths” and Spatial Inscriptions of Mourning in a Favela by Motta, Eugênia (2021) - The enormous number of bad deaths—violent, avoidable, commonplace deaths—produces not only painful inscriptions of mourning on houses but also the combination of youth, masculinity, and Blackness as a mark of death’s potentiality in still living bodies. Bad deaths thus reveal the moral entanglement between families, communities, and the materiality of houses, as well as the severance of these ties in the face of violence and intergenerational loss. Keywords: death; favela; home; house; las; maria; mourning; people; police
• Human Routers: How Syrian Refugee Brokers Build the Infrastructure of Displacement by Zuntz, Ann-Christin (2023) - Drawing on fieldwork with Syrian brokers in Turkey and the United Kingdom, I put forward the novel concepts of a Syrian infrastructure of displacement and of refugee brokers as a particular infrastructural component, namely, as human routers. As I was listening in on Farhan’s conversation, UK-based refugees’ money traveled to their loved ones through material and virtual infrastructures such as banking and roads, but just as much through human connections: a network of Syrian money brokers in different countries. Keywords: brokerage; brokers; business; channels; clients; displacement; faisal; farhan; infrastructure; journal; kingdom; migration; money; new; people; refugee; refugee brokers; routers; studies; syrian; turkey; united; work
• Anti-Blackness and Moral Repair: The Curse of Ham, Biblical Kinship, and the Limits of Liberalism by Haruyama, Justin (2024) - Francis’s close association in these comments between the help of white people and the help of God reminded me, uncomfortably, of a semi-serious wordplay joke I sometimes heard Nyanja-speakers tell in my presence (Nyanja is the second-most widely spoken language in Zambia): that when white people first came to Zambia, locals named them mzungu because the whites reminded them so much of God (in Nyanja, the word for God is mulungu).4 Francis and I continued conversing for several hours after this point, and I continued raising questions about the ostensibly good character of whites that Francis felt made them so appropriate as masters: for example, the history of brutal racial segregation and economic exploitation in Zambia under British imperialism. —1 John 4:20 Francis and I are almost the same age: at the time I met him he was twenty-nine Keywords: account; african; anthropology; black; christian; curse; francis; god; ham; history; kinship; new; noah; people; press; servants; time; university; white; words; world; york; zambia
• “Life is a Gamble”: Labors of Mobility, Risk and Return between Sudan and Lebanon by Reumert, Anna (2023) - Some observers see the failure to address the issue of statutory land rights as a missed opportunity, without which the agreement ultimately failed to end the war between militias in southern Sudan and the Sudanese government, preceding the secession of South Sudan a decade later (Babiker 2009; Komey 2008). Mughamara translates from Arabic as “adventure,” “gamble,” and “risk,” and implies in its root form the act of immersion; throwing oneself into something without knowing the outcome.1 This article is based on fieldwork with young migrant returnees who, like Bashir, are sons of subsistence farmers in western Sudan and worked low-skilled service jobs in Lebanon before an economic and political collapse in 2020 forced them to leave. Keywords: africa; awadalla; bashir; beirut; border; economy; khartoum; labor; land; lebanon; life; migrant; migration; mobility; people; press; return; risk; south; state; sudan; sudanese; time; university; women; work
• Sustaining Containability: Zero Waste and White Space by Resnick, Elana (2024) - After EU accession, the punkts of socialist-era recycling continued operations to fulfill EU Zero Waste targets, now as sites where recycling waste was both bought and accounted for in official documents. The material containability of waste bins, I suggest, parallels the containability of the European nation-state as white. Keywords: bins; bulgaria; city; collectors; containability; day; environmental; european; kloshari; labor; new; packaging; people; petko; press; punkts; recycling; recycling bins; romani; sofia; state; sustainability; trash; university; waste; work
• The Paradox of Humanitarian Recognition: Blackness, Predation, and Non-Statist Solidarities in the Migration of Eritreans to Europe by Berhane, Fiori (2024) - Based in Bologna, the group mainly comprised Eritrean men in their thirties who had made the Mediterranean crossing; the group also included Italian academics and journalists sympathetic to the experiences of Eritrean refugees. To address the violence Eritrean refugees face, the activists of the NGO petitioned state actors; they worked to shift public sentiments as producers of media and provided on-the-ground care for refugees experiencing state and community abandonment. Keywords: asylum; berhe; detention; eritreans; europe; human; italy; libya; migrants; migration; people; policies; press; protection; recognition; refugees; rights; smuggling; state; university; violence
• Deciphering a Non-meal: Pantawid-Gutom and the Everyday Negotiation of Hunger in the Philippines by Lasco, Gideon; Mendoza, Jhaki (2024) - Yet when disaster strikes—as in the case of the more than twenty-four typhoons that batter the country annually, people switch to root crops (Bertuso 2019, 82), just as people elsewhere turn to “hunger foods” or “famine foods” in times of crisis (Matalas and Grivetti 2007; Lasco et al. 2023). A portmanteau from the Tagalog (Filipino) words pantawid (something to help bridge or tide over) and gutom (hunger), pantawid-gutom had not previously struck us as anything other than food people consumed between meals. Keywords: anthropology; categories; culture; food; gutom; hunger; insecurity; interlocutors; lasco; manila; meal; non; nutrition; pantawid; people; philippines; rice; stomach; time; university; urban; work; year
• Through the Body of the Midwife: Ethos, Labor, and the Cultivation of Trust in Health Care in Yogyakarta, Indonesia by Smith, Catherine (2023) - Although midwives are trained health care workers—and not volunteers—similar sensibilities also likely rationalized the high expectations placed on village midwives to carry out extensive forms of labor beyond their assigned roles. In this article I take up the life histories of midwives like Yanti to examine the critical problem of how interpersonal trust between a practitioner and their patient might translate or fail to translate into a deeper, more generalized trust in health care. Keywords: birth; care; care workers; ethos; forms; health; health care; indonesia; labor; medicine; midwife; midwives; people; practice; siti; system; time; trust; village; women; workers; yogyakarta
• “Take Our Land” : Fronts, Fraud, and Fake Farmers in a City-to-Come by Wittekind, Courtney (2024) - Landowners, in particular, hoped to benefit from the project through formal compensation proposals or through the sale of project area land. Demands that the New Yangon City be built “as fast as possible” responded to this ill-fated history, which had left residents anxious to see the project move from plan to reality. Keywords: 2020; background; china; city; city project; cld; demonstrations; development; farmers; journal; land; members; myanmar; new; people; press; project; residents; southwest; state; studies; tin; tun; university; urban; yangon; yangon city
• The Ordinariness of Ethics and the Extraordinariness of Revolution: Ethical Selves and the Egyptian January Revolution at Home and School by Aly, Ramy (2024) - Anthropologies of revolution should pluralize and recognize the complex and variable ways that revolutions are experienced. Ethnography relocates revolution from the macro to the everyday, but this does not disconnect it from local cosmologies of kinship, myth, personhood, time, ritual, space, and power, all of which constitute and are reconstituted in revolutions (Cherstich, Holbraad, and Tassi 2020, 14–16, 50). Keywords: ahmed; amer; anthropology; egypt; egyptian; ethical; ethics; everyday; family; life; new; people; politics; press; revolution; school; self; time; university
• Linguistic Diversity on Center Stage: Rewriting Anthropology from the Margins of an MSI by Trinch, Shonna; Cassidy, Barbara; Suazo, Bianca; Mallol Nunez, Jadeline (2022) - Almost a quarter of John Jay College students come from the bottom 20 percent of income earners. With Seeing Rape, college students at an MSI claim authoritative positions about important topics as playwrights. Keywords: college; english; language; new; people; rape; spanish; students
• Dissonance: Cartooning in Iran, Humor, and the Study of Things That Don’t Match by Göpfert, Mirco (2024) - I was immediately struck by the surreal darkness that many cartoons conveyed: visual echoes of Sadegh Hedayat’s writings. Not without cynicism she asserted that drawing cartoons becomes easier when so much incongruity is already built into the world in front of you. Keywords: 2022; anthropology; cartooning; cartoonists; cartoons; dissonance; drawing; elements; experience; flower; humor; iran; iranian; khosravi; new; people; practice; press; public; tehran; theory; university; varesi; way
• The Malicious Game: Friendship, Foresight, and Philosophy at an Iraqi Teahouse in Jordan by Sheldon, Zachary (2023) - And, elsewhere in the region, card games conjure an interactional frame that enables social contact across sectarian divisions (Levy 1999). Older games were swapped out for a new and malicious presence. Keywords: anthropology; arabic; avicenna; board; estimation; experience; future; game; intellect; iraqi; jaakaaroo; jordan; knowledge; life; new; people; philosophy; play; players; playing; press; teahouse; university; wardi
• Effective Cynicism: Waste, Power, and the Negotiation of Urban Decay and Renewal in Ulaanbaatar by Plueckhahn, Rebekah (2024) - They engaged in an acute moral questioning of the potential equitable (or inequitable) portioning of larger urban wholes and the rights of Ulaanbaatar residents dwelling within them. They shared with me their experiences as part of a larger goal to highlight (and have me document through my ethnographic research) the lived experience of Ulaanbaatar residents during this period of transformation. Keywords: building; construction; cynicism; land; mongolia; networks; people; power; press; processes; redevelopment; reflections; relations; residents; rubbish; sloterdijk; state; ulaanbaatar; urban; waste
• In the Shade of Hailstones: Life-Forming Realities among the Luo of Kano, Kenya by Opande, Kennedy; Onyango-Ouma, Washington (2024) - Jane Bennett (2010) and Cymene Howe (2019) provide a basis for the concept of cosmo-juridical agency, which we associate with the Luo connection between hailstone medicines and rituals for newly born twins undertaken to protect and propagate both rice and human life. LIFE-FORMING: On the Nexus of Human Lives, Rituals, Plants, and Natural Phenomena The connection between human life and natural phenomena has received substantial commentary. Keywords: agency; charms; crops; cultural; digging; farmers; force; hailstones; human; kano; life; lives; luo; medicine; people; phenomena; rice; ritual; twins
• On and In Their Bodies: Masculinist Violence, Criminalization, and Black Womanhood in Trinidad by Welcome, Leniqueca (2024) - In this article, I place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers; the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state; the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence; and the grief black women are often forced to carry. ABSTRACT In this article, I place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in Trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers, the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state, the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence, and the grief black women are often forced to carry. Keywords: bodies; body; caribbean; children; community; death; deja; gendered; grief; life; people; police; shop; son; state; tobago; trinidad; university; violence; women; work
• Evoking Eternity: Orthodox Co-presence in Post-Yugoslav Central Serbia by Lackenby, Nicholas (2024) - Contrasting the “Spirit of Eternity” with the “Spirit of Time,” Popović (2005, 147) characterizes time as but a “fragment” of the eternal realm, a fragment that becomes meaningless when disconnected from eternity. When the historian Timothy Snyder (2018, 166) introduces the “politics of eternity” as an analytic, he means political projects bereft of forward momentum and innovative content: “Eternity takes certain points from the past and portrays them as moments of righteousness, discarding the time in between.” Keywords: alongside; anthropology; church; dead; death; dimension; eternal; eternity; future; god; history; interlocutors; kraljevo; life; living; new; orthodox; people; present; press; serbia; stefan; thinking; time; town; university; world
• Getting Your Ducks in a Row: Marriage, Protection, and Love without Regret in Virginia by Magee, Siobhan (2025) - My fieldwork took place in the early years of marriage equality, but also in the first year of the first Trump presidency, and people told me they didn’t know what was going to happen next, if there was going to be a backslide, if the right to legal marriage could be taken away. For sure, legal marriage in the United States has always been deadly serious. Keywords: charlottesville; community; death; family; kinship; life; love; marriage; people; place; politics; press; protection; rights; safety; states; threat; time; united; university; virginia; wedding; white
• How to Sustain a Strike: Rules, Routines, and the Essential in Kashmir by Trisal, Nishita (2025) - One rarely found shops open on strike days, but they would open as soon as the relaxation came into place. Strike calendar, August 1-5, 2016. Keywords: anthropology; bank; calendar; cultural; curfew; day; employees; general; government; indian; july; kashmir; labor; people; press; resistance; sacrifice; self; state; strike; time; university; uprising; work
• Soil Forensics: Property and the Buried Truth in Medellín by Morris, Meghan (2025) - In examining how soil forensics operated as an evidentiary argument about property, I follow other scholars of forensics in analyzing how forensics are used 756outside the context of crime and policing (Azuero-Quijano 2021; Pietz 2002; Ralph 2015). As city agencies broke ground for the Green Belt, soil forensics activated old specters on new terms, challenging official narratives of the war and of reordering property for peace. Keywords: belt; city; city government; colombia; comuna; disaster; evidence; forensics; government; green; material; medellín; officials; peace; people; property; residents; risk; social; soil; truth; urban; villatina; war
• Resisting Alternative Images: An Ethnography of Visual Disinformation in Brazil by Leaha, Mihai Andrei; Canals, Roger (2024) - Performing Images in the Streets The first instance of offline iconic resistance to alternative images that we analyze relates to the use of the body as a public image in demonstrations, especially against Bolsonaro. We define alternative images as images with a deceptive referential value. Keywords: alternative; anthropology; article; bolsonaro; brazil; checking; context; digital; disinformation; fact; fake; figure; images; lula; lupa; media; new; online; paulo; people; research; right; são; trust; truth; visual
• Religious Afterlives of a Revolution by Mittermaier, Amira (2025) - “It was like crack,” she says, “God God God.” For eighteen days this was God manifesting in the mīdān [square], and you could feel it like there was no escape.” Keywords: afterlives; anthropology; egypt; egyptian; god; interlocutors; islam; layla; mona; new; people; post; press; religion; revolution; revolutionary; self; square; sufism; tahrir; time; university; uprising; yoga
• The Revolutionary’s Two Temporalities? Activism, Failure, and Uneventing by Prasse-Freeman, Elliott (2025) - The perdurance of calls for revolution across these multiple moments, not to mention the perpetual activist mobilization and its indeterminate outcomes, index a particularly potent and enduring challenge faced by political activists everywhere: that they are compelled to work at multiple temporal scales. It has demonstrated how political activists often delineate temporality allochronically, differentiating the time of the event (the weeks when decades happen) from banal time (those decades when nothing happens) to then highlight how this view of cleanly bifurcated temporality underestimates the potential for the event to later dissolve (Juris 2008; Jansen 2019), receding again into a normal time now laced with the residue of failure. Keywords: activism; activists; anthropological; anthropology; aung; burmese; change; coup; event; failure; future; history; journal; mdcf; military; myanmar; people; present; press; revolution; series; taw; temporality; time; university
• On Chainsaws and Acoustic Violence: Sound and Deforestation in Ajusco-Chichinautzin, Mexico by Green, Andrew (2025) - Yet since chainsaws are also used in legitimate forest manage- ment, forest guards must make contextually informed judgments about whether chainsaw sounds are illicit or permitted, which depend on their emplaced and embodied sensory knowledge of specific forests. During ethnographic re- search in the surrounding area of Ajusco-Chichinautzin, situated between the expanding metropolis of Mexico City and the threatened forest around it, I have sought to understand the complex entanglements of sound, music, and deforesta- tion. Keywords: acoustic; ajusco; anthropology; chainsaws; chichinautzin; city; deforestation; forest; guards; listening; loggers; logging; mexico; music; nicolás; park; people; police; san; sound; talamontes; totolapan; town; violence
• Blessed Acts of Oblivion: On the Ethics of Forgetting by Heywood, Paolo (2025) - new memory.” As a large body of scholarship has shown, while injunctions to remember Fas- cist crimes form some of the foundational components of the postwar Italian state and the basis of some its popular culture and social movements (see, e.g., Passerini 1987), public memories of Fascism in Italy are also “hazy, selective, CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 40:1 110 and unreliable” (Malone 2017, 445; see also Corner 2002, 2005; Fogu 2006; Foot 2009; Mammone 2006; Pavone 2000). Keywords: anthropology; case; fascism; forgetfulness; forgetting; history; italian; italy; memories; memory; mussolini; new; oblivion; party; past; people; place; predappio; press; remembering; self; town
• Touched by Deep Time: Earthquake Sickness in Mexico City by Summers, Lachlan (2025) - Following Kathryn Yusoff (2017), I understand Mexico City as a “geosocial stratum,” rather than only an assortment of human things superimposed on a geological foundation: I agree that there is a connection between the endless creep of tectonic plates below and the muted unraveling of buildings above. Central to my argument is that, for buildings in Mexico City, destruction is only a relative condition. Keywords: american; anthropology; apartment; building; city; cracks; cultural; del; earthquake; elena; fear; figure; fright; human; illness; long; mexican; mexico; mexico city; motion; new; people; press; residents; social; state; susto; time; tocado; university
• Debt and the American Dream: The Specter of Debt and Its Slow Violence among Irregular Migrants from Nepal by Zharkevich, Ina (2025) - Whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, the institution of debtor prison allowed some debtors to “use their bodies as economic collateral for debts” (Gregory 2012, 434), in nineteenth- and even twentieth-century Nepal, people became bonded laborers or slaves if they could not repay debt. The Gender of Debt: Male Migrants, Spirit Possession, and Death The burden of debt often concealed yet another burden: the pressure on young men by their families—often wives and mothers—to migrate at all costs and provide for the family (Zharkevich 2019b). Keywords: anthropology; debt; families; future; journey; life; migrants; migration; nepal; people; possession; press; spirit; states; tension; time; united; university; years
• Marine Inequality, Borderization, and the Radical Potential of Kinship by McCormack, Fiona (2025) - Paul-Burke, Kura, Joseph Burke, Te Ūpokorehe Resource Management Team, Charlie Bluett, and Tim Senior 2018 “Using Māori Knowledge to Assist Understandings and Management of Shellfish Populations in Ōhiwa Harbour, Aotearoa New Zealand.” While the fiction of mare nullius was revealed in 1986 when Tom Te Weehi, a pāua (abalone) fisher accused of breaching fisheries regulations, successfully argued that traditional Māori fishing rights could override European laws (Jackson 2013), and later in the 2003 Ngati Apa v. Attorney-General decision regarding customary land in the foreshore and seabed area (Charters and Erueti 2007), the actualization of Māori marine property rights and relations is constrained (Harrison 2022; Keywords: act; aquaculture; area; bordering; borders; claims; colonial; hapū; iwi; kinship; marine; moana; mussel; māori; new; new zealand; people; property; rights; sea; settlement; space; spat; tainui; takutai; tribal; whāingaroa; zealand

• Anthropology and Open Access by Jackson, Jason Baird; Anderson, Ryan (2014) - Suber (2004b) notes that there are two main vehicles for “delivering OA to research articles, OA journals (‘gold OA’) and OA repositories (‘green OA’).” Like their “toll access” counterparts, OA journals usually engage in peer review (for articles), have editors and editorial boards, regular publication schedules, and all the rest of the inhered apparatus of scholarly journal publishing. Keywords: aaa; access; american; anthropologists; anthropology; author; gold; green; issues; journal; publishers; publishing; research; scholars; society; system; university; way; work
• Dear Dr. Freud by Briggs, Charles L. (2014) - Your essay helped me think through poetic and acoustic features of the laments, the demands they made on listeners, and what they can tell us about the work of mourning and anthropology. My goal is to reflect on my engagement with “Mourning and Melancholia” and the particular forms of mourning I encountered, not to position myself as critiquing psychoanalysis or anthropology. Keywords: anthropology; briggs; death; enrique; epidemic; freud; health; laments; macotera; mamerto; melancholia; mourning; muaina; new; poetics; press; process; reality; testing; time; university; words; work
• Designing Digital Infrastructure: Four Considerations for Scholarly Publishing Projects by Kenner, Ali (2014) - Now that CA is self-publishing, however, OJS and Typhoon (the open-source platform built for CA Online v.2) have become integrated beyond these referential links. By the time CA Online v.2 launched in 2012, the legacy site had more than seven hundred pages of content. Keywords: access; anthropology; content; digital; editorial; infrastructure; journal; media; ojs; online; platform; publishing; support; work
• Cultural Anthropology and the Infrastructure of Publishing by Elfenbein, Timothy W. (2014) - Cultural Anthropology website, March 11. Only after we have created and corrected all the article records, uploaded the final files, and built journal issues from them will we be able to publish the content on our website. Keywords: aaa; access; anthropology; article; content; files; journal; metadata; new; open; publishing; sca; website
• States of Camouflage by Jusionyte, Ieva (2015) - Other state practices are formally authorized as genuine but are equally deceptive: the prefecture, gendarmerie, and customs officials, among others responsible for law enforcement on the border, facilitating and covering up contraband. Grappling with the question of state legitimacy in the face of forgeries, corruption within its own procedures, and the mimesis of its structures, Veena Das (2004, 245) writes that this “iterability” of state practices for illegitimate purposes “becomes not a sign of vulnerability but a mode of circulation through which power is produced.” Keywords: ambulance; anthropology; argentina; border; camouflage; chief; corruption; crime; department; emergency; fire; firefighters; frontier; iguazú; law; moretti; paraguay; practices; press; public; security; state; statecraft; university
• Editors' Farewell by Allison, Anne; Piot, Charles (2014) - This includes our two wonderful managing editors, Ali Kenner and Tim Elfenbein, without whom we could not have operated and who did so much for the website and the transition to OA; all the authors who gave us their best and then worked to make their contributions even better, and also those whose submissions did not make it into the journal (despite many being top quality); the reviewers who so generously gave of their time and wrote such substantive reviews; our editorial board who provided advice, reviews, and camaraderie during annual get-togethers at the AAAs; those graduate students of ours who worked as editorial assistants (Spencer, Brian, Nadia, Leigh, and Brian); Vani Subramanian who has produced one magical cover after another for the journal; the fastidious attention given the manuscripts by our copyeditors (Lisl, Sara, and Petra); the deans at Duke University who generously provided financial support and teaching release; the stable of graduate student interns from departments around the country who have been amazingly creative and generous in the labor they have given to produce content for the website; the members of the Society for Cultural Anthropology board who have given the journal and us as editors such continuous and thoughtful support; and all of you as readers who—in reading the journal and website—have kept Cultural Anthropology running as a site of excellence and innovation in the field today. Though we were right about the workload (and what does it say about the labor of editing academic journals these days that our predecessors were also a couple and our successors a collective of three?), we’ve immensely enjoyed the intellectual engagement, the excitement of working with authors writing with such diverse theoretical palettes about such varied terrain, and the challenge of trying to keep tempo with the times—of trying to keep anthropology and the journal in sync with the world we inhabit. Keywords: anthropology; journal
• Editors’ Introduction to 30.1: Circles Not Pyramids by Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene (2015) - Editors’ Introduction to 30.1 Editors’ Introduction to 30.1: Circles Not Pyramids DOMINIC BOYER JAMES FAUBION CYMENE HOWE Rice University Editorial collective, Cultural Anthropology (2015–2018) This is our first issue as editors of Cultural Anthropology, but more importantly, the issue in which the journal turns thirty, old enough to understand its place in the world, but still young enough to dream of better years ahead. Keywords: access; anthropology; content; journal; publication
• Editorial Curation and the Durability of Anthropological Ideas In a Time of Ambient Innovation: A Comment on the Thirtieth Year of Cultural Anthropology by Marcus, George (2015) - The theory tendencies, applications, and topical concerns of the so-called postmodern (poststructuralist?) era eminently prepared anthropology for its various engagements through fealty to fieldwork in a world in which speed of change has become a defining characteristic and challenge to the deliberate slowness and patience that constitutes the essence of anthropological research. It is to manage the relative slowness of anthropological research as a key positive value with a sensation of a sometimes unbearably sped-up pace of contemporary events and changing conditions of existence, normatively keyed to acting by innovation, and in which the analytic default is to concentrate reflective, value-laden critical thinking on the temporality of the emergent or the detectable near future. Keywords: anthropology; critique; editorial; journal; research
• Relational Space: An Earthly Installation by Battaglia, Debbora; Valentine, David; Olson, Valerie (2015) - That said, terrestrially life-threatening outer space is physically and socially connected with terrestrial spaces and extends anthropological research environments. In effect, people’s investments of intellectual, affective, and material resources for moving off Earth—embodied, via remote-sensing, or in dreams—provoke, in no uncertain terms, a recasting of central (and deeply connected) arguments concerning discourses of inter-being relations of nature (where space natures bring cultures up against limits of sovereignty, colonization, resource management, even human material attachments to the sun and its environments) or of the human (as post-earthling kinship across species figures alternatives to the “human-machine partnership” Keywords: anthropological; anthropology; battaglia; cosmos; earth; human; life; new; olson; relations; space; university; valentine
• Condition—Suspension by Choy, Timothy; Zee, Jerry (2015) - tries to stick with something becoming atmospheric” (Stewart 2011, 454), streaking it with modes of atmospheric suspension. These are emergent and relational potencies of substances and air conditions. Keywords: air; anthropology; atmospheric; attention; condition; earth; medium; mushroom; new; press; sand; suspension; things; tunnel; university; wind
• Some Reflections on Editing with Contrarian Sensibilities by Segal, Daniel A. (2015) - As editor, I sought to nudge cultural anthropology in these closely related directions by giving editorial preference to work that was at once historical and anthropological.3 A third and final target of my editorial preferences was work that brought cultural anthropological perspectives to bear on the immediately newsworthy, producing a regular feature in the journal under the heading “In The News.”4 Editing the journal was thus a singular opportunity both to learn from good research in cultural anthropology and to get a sense of what questions and issues were grabbing the discipline’s attention. Keywords: anthropology; editor; history; journal; work; world
• Cultural Anthropology, 1992–1996 by Myers, Fred (2015) - This was not standard practice for scholarly journals, but given the mission of Cultural Anthropology, I continued this editorial prerogative as George had established it. Cultural Anthropology, 1992–1996 Cultural Anthropology, 1992–1996 FRED MYERS New York University I became the second editor of Cultural Anthropology in 1991, with my first issue published in 1992. Keywords: anthropology; journal; new; work
• The Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive by Garcia, Angela (2016) - CORRESPONDENCE This article offers an ethnographic account of an archive of prison letters written by three generations of women: Bernadette, her mother Eugenia, and Bernadette’s daughter, Ashley. The archive of prison letters offers another way to conceive of this history of rupture, displacement, and connection experienced by Hispano families. Keywords: addiction; anthropology; archive; ashley; bernadette; eugenia; heroin; history; letters; mexico; mother; new; press; prison; research; time; university; way; women; work; writing
• An Infrastructural Moment in the Human Sciences by Fortun, Kim; Fortun, Mike (2015) - —T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” Very early in our tenure as coeditors of Cultural Anthropology (2005–2010), before we began our years-long, nagging push for open access—an issue about which we had almost no awareness at the time1—we had a seemingly more minor and short-lived nagging struggle with the journal’s copyeditor (whose work overall we greatly appreciated). If anything made Cultural Anthropology different from other journals in anthropology, it was its openness to more open forms of writing, its openness to methodological, conceptual, and textual experimentation. Keywords: access; anthropology; essay; form; infrastructure; journal; publishing; time
• Anthropology Electric by Boyer, Dominic (2015) - Electrical energy charges, flows, and systematicity became key analytic analogies for Freud as he designed his metapsychological schema. This is not an idle question because electricity already works us. Keywords: anthropology; electrical; electricity; energy; flows; freud; grid; power; process; work
• Editing the Times by Allison, Anne; Piot, Charles (2015) - Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, February 2. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/208-revolution-and-counter-revolution-in-egypt-a-year-after-january-25th Fortun, Kim, and Mike Fortun 2015 Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, July 27. Keywords: anthropology; journal; publishing; series; spots; times; website
• On the Problem of the Namesake by LaFlamme, Marcel (2015) - ORCID is administered by a member-based nonprofit organization that is committed to privacy and interoperability, and scholars can create ORCID identifiers free of charge. To date, more than 1.8 million researchers around the world have signed up, and publishers large and small are beginning to incorporate ORCID identifiers into their production processes. Keywords: anthropology; orcid; problem
• Theorizing (Vaccine) Refusal: Through the Looking Glass by Sobo, Elisa J. (2016) - Further comparison, between and within groups, revealed vaccine refusal as a complex, multifaceted, processual activity—something that the layperson’s use of the phrase vaccine refusal, with its categorical focus on the rejecting aspect, failed to account for. Ortner argues that hesitance to explore such things, perhaps for fear of undermining the political aims of study participants, has led to the creation of a superficial and impoverished record that, along with being partial, has stunted the growth and development of resistance-related theory.1 It is the same with vaccine refusal: although all parents who are not in full conformity with vaccine recommendations/requirements have traditionally been lumped together as “refusers,” great diversity exists within the lot. Keywords: anthropology; health; parents; refusal; resistance; school; sobo; vaccination; vaccine
• Financing Open Access: Introducing Friends of Cultural Anthropology by Allison, Anne; Boyer, Dominic; Piot, Charles (2016) - Since open access is, above all, a collaborative venture, we would welcome your help in building out Friends of Cultural Anthropology into a sustainable, vibrant organization. Financing Open Access: Introducing Friends of Cultural Anthropology Financing Open Access: Introducing Friends of Cultural Anthropology ANNE ALLISON Duke University http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8626-9550 DOMINIC BOYER Rice University http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406X CHARLES PIOT Duke University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9166-9935 While Cultural Anthropology’s move to open access has been positive in an abundance of ways, challenges remain. Keywords: access; anthropology; journal
• Golden Snail Opera: The More-than-Human Performance of Friendly Farming on Taiwan’s Lanyang Plain by Tsai, Yen-Ling; Carbonell, Isabelle; Chevrier, Joelle; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2016) - Are there differences between newcomers, such as golden snails, and old residents? When the season comes, golden snails invade our work and jokes, and even our dreams. Keywords: anthropology; farmers; farming; film; ghosts; history; kinds; knowledge; new; opera; paddy; press; rice; science; snails; taiwan; text; university; video; water; work; world; yilan
• Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores by Zee, Jerry C. (2017) - The paths on the institute’s grounds curve and meander through what Li Ming says were sand dunes just years earlier. Loosed on the wind, desert sands gather into dunes that flow like a slow liquid, land swallowing land. Keywords: anthropology; china; chinese; control; desert; desertification; dunes; engineering; forms; future; landscape; minqin; new; politics; press; process; processes; sand; species; state; succession; time; university; university press
• Queer Anthropology: An Introduction by Manalansan IV, Martin F. (2016) - As Margot Weiss (2016, 634) elegantly puts it in her essay, queer studies and queer anthropology are about dreaming of a utopic world(s) to enable ways to imagine, think, or desire “otherwise.” Thus, to mark the field not only in terms of what it is but also in terms of what it can be lies at the core of what I have described as the aspirational and desiring orientation of queer studies and queer anthropology. Keywords: anthropology; queer; studies
• Encountering Indeterminacy: Colonial Contexts and Queer Imagining by Morgensen, Scott L. (2016) - Citing critical insights in Black studies and Black feminist thought, Allen (2011, 187, 97) defies the racist optics placed on Black life by arguing “that inhering in these small, intimate, troubled spaces is a powerful and virtually unexplored ground for political possibilities” where erotic subjectivity “works towards not only transgressing but transcending and finally transforming hegemonies of global capital, the state, and of bourgeois, limited, and limiting notions of gender, sexuality, and blackness.” Without preemptively folding these works into queer anthropology, as opposed to other categories to which they may belong, I indicate their capacity to breach or circumvent the tensions that appear once queer and anthropology meet. Traversing the imbrications of anthropology and coloniality, queer anthropology advances beyond concerns about defining an object to congeal around concerns of context and method. Keywords: anthropology; colonial; gender; knowledge; power; press; queer; university; university press; white
• One View from a Deterritorialized Realm: How Black/Queer Renarrativizes Anthropological Analysis by Allen, Jafari Sinclaire (2016) - In the wake of the state-sanctioned police executions of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, and others,2 and the domestic-terror assassination of Black churchgoers at the historic church of one of the nation’s most famous slave insurrectionists, and also in a moment in which there is at once unprecedented visibility of Black queer and trans people and record numbers of unsolved murders of Black and Brown trans women in the United States and elsewhere, Cohen draws out another dimension of what I called a “cosmetic, evacuated reflex chant.” And as scholars writing on lesbian and gay studies and, later, queer studies “in the house of anthropology” (Weston 1993; Boellstorff 2007a) have shown, anthropological contributions to what came to be known as queer studies predates the emergence of queer as a term of art. Keywords: anthropology; black; new; politics; queer; race; sex; sexuality; studies; work; york
• Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology by Weiss, Margot (2016) - I know I do in the classroom, and the same holds true for most of the new essays and monographs in queer anthropology (for a review of new queer anthropology, see Weiss 2016). —Tim Ingold What is queer in queer anthropology today? Keywords: anthropology; desire; gay; identity; lesbian; new; press; queer; studies; university
• A Clinical Economy of Speculation: Financial Trading and Gambling Disorder in Spain by Núñez, Jorge (2017) - This article concerns itself with Silvia and the clinical economy of her transformation from financial trader to problem gambler. This article develops the concept of a clinical economy of speculation, which refers to “the exchange of symptoms for diagnosis and treatments” (Davis 2010, 155) through which the category of the problem gambler is repurposed to include financial traders. Keywords: 2013; anthropology; credit; crisis; debt; disorder; economy; finance; freelance; gambling; market; new; nuria; press; problem; public; silvia; social; spain; spanish; speculation; stock; time; traders; trading; university
• Sound + Vision: Experimenting with the Anthropological Research Article of the Future by Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; LaFlamme, Marcel (2016) - We find it interesting that despite the abundance of filmic, photographic, and sonic material that most anthropologists now generate in the course of fieldwork, we have not yet really committed ourselves as a discipline to exploring new multimodal forms of anthropological research publication. Experimenting with the Anthropological Research Article of the Future DOMINIC BOYER http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406X JAMES FAUBION http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0847-3008 CYMENE HOWE http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9361-3812 MARCEL LAFLAMME http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7489-4233 Rice University Are we satisfied with the conventional media for anthropological research and publication? Keywords: anthropological; anthropology; new; research; sound; vision
• Speed: An Introduction by Duclos, Vincent; Criado, Tomás Sánchez; Nguyen, Vinh-Kim (2017) - To put it in a nutshell, they do not see speed as the enemy: rather, it is the paralysis produced by capitalist speed and its capture of everything indeterminate. We ask: How can different forms of speed temporalize futures and shape the present conditions of knowledge and life in certain ways and not others? Keywords: anthropology; future; life; new; press; speed; things; time; university; way; world
• Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy by Appel, Hannah (2017) - In the conclusion, I open out the theoretical and methodological implications of ethnographic attention to the national economy form: lest we be tempted to imagine Equatorial Guinea as exceptional (which, of course, it is in some ways) or generalize only to other African economies or economies of the global South, we need only think about Brexit in relation to the European Union or the collision course between the Anthropocene and economic growth (most often calculated nationally) to begin to imagine the ethnographic possibilities of national economies more generally, as perhaps the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, I trace how and to what effects Equatorial Guinea’s national economy was imagined and reproduced through economic theory and desire, futurity and dystopia, state and corporate power. Keywords: anthropology; conference; country; curse; economic; economies; economy; gdp; global; guinea; history; money; national; new; oil; power; press; princeton; resource; sector; state; theory; university; world
• What Matters by Lutz, Catherine (2017) - Sometimes affect is treated as a synonym of emotion, sometimes as a kind of master category that includes specific feelings and emotions, and sometimes as an inchoate feeling or intensity that stands in contrast to emotions, which are then defined narrowly as objects of discrete and linguistically coded meanings. We could focus more on the work that emotion and emotions do as forms of sociality and embodied experience (Jones 2004; Martin 2013). Keywords: affect; affective; anthropology; emotion; life; new; press; theory; university; work
• Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field by Berry, Maya J.; Chávez Argüelles, Claudia; Cordis, Shanya; Ihmoud, Sarah; Velásquez Estrada, Elizabeth (2017) - Women researchers can be accepted as political allies, but this alliance does not entail horizontal dialogues within the framework of gender equality. I had also internalized the idea that black women cannot afford to draw any more attention to our already hypervisible bodies. Keywords: activist; anthropologists; anthropology; bodies; body; colonial; experiences; feminist; field; fieldwork; gang; gender; gendered; methods; power; praxis; press; research; researchers; space; state; university; violence; women
• Chemo-Ethnography: An Introduction by Shapiro, Nicholas; Kirksey, Eben (2017) - Sensing technologies and collaborations with allies in other disciplines are also allowing ethnographers to study chemical species in water, soil, air, human bodies, and emergent ecological assemblages. In contrast to biological species, which are relatively stable (see Kirksey 2015), chemical species may quickly change state. Keywords: anthropology; chemical; chemo; communities; durham; ethnographers; life; new; press; science; sensing; social; species; starting; states; university; university press
• Sovereignty: An Introduction by Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani (2017) - Bishara (2017, 350) shows that even though they have not ultimately restructured state sovereignty, these assertions “challenge the legitimacy of state authorities, create new forms of collectivity, and forge new ideas of how power should function, even though they have not ultimately restructured state power.” In recent years, cultural anthropologists studying the global crisis of the nation-state as the primary vehicle of sovereign power have taken up the critical reevaluation of sovereignty engendered by Agamben’s work, inspiring new lines of inquiry and challenges to the foundational assumptions about state power in a range of ethnographic studies. Keywords: anthropology; authority; forms; power; sovereignty; state
• Unsettling Sovereignty by Bonilla, Yarimar (2017) - As a result, postcolonial sovereignty more often than not resulted in enduring forms of non-sovereignty (Bonilla 2013, 2015). Yet the move to cast these political forms as mutations or exceptions problematically reinscribes the classic model of political sovereignty as an actually existing relationship—a measurable quality of states—rather than viewing it as a discursive figure produced through the colonial encounter. Keywords: anthropology; durham; forms; global; n.c; power; press; sovereignty; state; university; university press
• In the Shadow of the Palm: Dispersed Ontologies among Marind, West Papua by Chao, Sophie (2018) - Yet at the same time as many Khalaoyam community members struggle to curb the expansion of oil palm, they have learned from their urban kin and NGO workers that they themselves routinely use and consume foods and goods that contain palm oil—instant noodles, ketchup, shampoo, and soap, for instance. While foreign plume-hunters decimated bird of paradise populations in the forest (Swadling 1996, 176–99), viral and bacterial organisms ravaged Marind communities in the form of influenza and lymphogranuloma venereum (van Baal 1966, 24–25).8 With the influx of Indonesian officials, settlers, and military forces following the transfer of the administration of West Papua to the Republic of Indonesia in 1963, large-scale landscape conversions continued in the form of rice cultivation, oil palm plantations, and mining and logging concessions (Monbiot 1989; Keywords: anthropology; bian; care; forest; human; instance; khalaoyam; land; life; marind; merauke; multispecies; new; oil; oil palm; palm; papua; plant; plantations; press; relations; sawit; time; university; university press; york
• The Road Forward by Ginsburg, Faye (2018) - It came from Amalia Córdova, the curator of Latinx and Indigenous digital and emerging media at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife, an important scholar and advocate of Indigenous media in Latin America and a fellow supporter of the work of the remarkable Brazilian collective Video nas Aldeias (VnA), arguably the most successful and robust of Indigenous media groups on the planet (Aufderheide 1995). In the important works addressed by each contributor to this collection on Indigenous media futures, we have the privilege to learn how books, films, animations, archives, and installations are being used to build powerful alternative imaginaries for contemporary Indigenous lives. Keywords: anthropology; australia; canada; cultural; film; future; media; video; work
• Algorithms and Automation: An Introduction by Lowrie, Ian (2018) - This would be, at best, premature: as the contributions collected here amply demonstrate, algorithmic assemblages remain thoroughly integrated with and reliant on myriad forms of human labor for their function, despite my insistence on the genuine novelty and power of algorithmic automation. Not all automation is algorithmic, but all algorithms automate, and the extension of algorithmic automation from purely mathematical and computational terrains to extended sociotechnical infrastructures has produced profound, ongoing, and open-ended transformations in the organization and function of contemporary social worlds. Keywords: algorithms; anthropology; assemblages; automation; data; forms; human; labor; new; processes; social
• Toward Adversary Anthropologies, or, How to Build Your Own Revolutionary Infrastructure by LaFlamme, Marcel; Boyer, Dominic (2018) - Path One: Starting a journal The model of journal publishing with which most of us are familiar involves soliciting manuscripts that are reviewed on an exclusive and anonymous basis by a small number of reviewers selected by the journal’s editors. Scholarly blogs like Allegra Lab, Anthrodendum, Footnotes, and Somatosphere have meanwhile lapped journals as the liveliest nodes of disciplinary debate, publishing vital scholarship but also constituting publics whose participants can find allies for bold political programs. Keywords: access; anthropology; hannerz; journal; new; project; publishing; scholars; system; time
• Circling Back by Howe, Cymene; Faubion, James; Boyer, Dominic (2018) - Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, December 22. Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, September 26. Keywords: anthropology; editors; introduction; journal; work
• The Delta is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey by Scaramelli, Caterina (2019) - These were questions of infrastructural moral ecology. This analytic proves helpful for understanding how, and why, people confront and respond to environmental transformations in an infrastructural world.3 Building on recent work highlighting the interconnections of ecology and infrastructure (Carse 2012; Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Stoetzer 2018), and on notions of moral economy (Scott 1977; Muehlebach 2012; see also Thompson 1971), I call for a more expansive anthropological interrogation of moral ecology. Keywords: anthropology; area; claims; conservation; delta; ecologies; ecology; environmental; erdal; fishermen; fishing; gediz; homa; infrastructure; izmir; lagoon; marshes; national; new; practices; press; relations; research; residents; salt; studies; sıkı; transformations; turkey; university; water; wetland; work
• Solidarity Dilemmas in Times of Austerity: Auto-ethnographic Interventions by Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (2020) - Such nuanced local views can help us appreciate that solidarity initiatives in Greece generate a political awareness nurturing a productive self-critique: participating in humanitarian solidarity is not a radical break from neoliberal austerity, and many solidarians are self-aware of these limitations (Cabot 2013, 2014). In this article, I test the effectiveness of the analytical tool introduced here against a set of irresolvable dilemmas that emerged from the context of humanitarian solidarity initiatives in austerity-stricken Greece. Keywords: anthropological; anthropology; austerity; authorial; compromise; crisis; eléni; ethnographic; greece; greek; humanitarian; initiatives; marxist; mihális; new; patras; politics; press; resistance; rozakou; self; solidarity; theodossopoulos; university
• Editors’ Introduction by Weiss, Brad; Paxson, Heather; Nelson, Christopher (2019) - Every bit as important has been the indispensable work of our editorial staff, managing editor Marcel LaFlamme and editorial assistant Jessica Lockrem, as well as the leadership and member support of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the section of the American Anthropological Association that remains committed to publishing an open-access journal and to investing in the scholarly infrastructure that makes this possible. Editors’ Introduction Editors’ Introduction BRAD WEISS College of William and Mary https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3795-0064 HEATHER PAXSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-5429 CHRISTOPHER NELSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3293-3185 What is your vision for Cultural Anthropology? Keywords: anthropology; journal
• The Limits of Corporate Chains and Brand Management: “Loyalty” and the Efficacy of Vernacular Markets in the Andes by Müller, Juliane (2021) - They represent about 1.5 to 2 million people (of a total population of 11.5 million) who are, in one way or another, involved in trading and related activities.9 Whereas electronics traders share their principal organizational forms and terms of political engagement with traders of food and less expensive manufactured products such as clothes and furniture, some important particularities exist. Electronics traders have constructed commercial areas and shopping precincts for customers looking for original brand-name goods. Keywords: 2013; anthropology; bolivia; brand; business; commercial; corporations; economic; economy; electronics; employees; goods; market; marketing; multinationals; paz; prices; products; retail; sales; samsung; social; traders; university; value; vernacular
• Becoming-After: The Lives and Politics of Quinine’s Remains by Middleton, Townsend (2021) - Yet, despite not having produced a dose in decades, government cinchona plantations first established by the British in the nineteenth century still exist in the Darjeeling hills—albeit in a dilapidated state. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. Keywords: anthropology; cinchona; cinchona plantations; colonial; darjeeling; factory; future; government; india; industry; land; life; new; plantations; politics; present; press; quinine; remains; time; university; workers; world
• Beyond Compassionate Aid: Precarious Bureaucrats and Dutiful Asylum Seekers in Italy by Giudici, Daniela (2021) - Yet as the emergency regime became, once again, a structural feature of migrant management (Campesi 2018), the already fragile allegiance of asylum workers to state institutions began to crack, laying bare underlying tensions (Giudici 2020). By bringing together the plight of asylum workers and refugees’ claims, these recent political struggles work to shape an alternative discourse on Others, one based not on the intrinsic asymmetries of compassion (see also Arendt 2006), but rather on shared mechanisms of oppression. Keywords: aid; anthropology; asylum; asylum seekers; crisis; european; forms; italian; italy; migrants; migration; new; politics; public; reception; reception workers; refugee; rights; seekers; services; social; state; system; welfare; workers
• Gestures of Care and Recognition: An Introduction by Cubellis, Lauren (2020) - To think about the way absence becomes its own marker of care, we began thinking with the concept of trace—the remnant by which a former presence is indexed, the absence that remains, and how this absent presence is recognized. An Introduction LAUREN CUBELLIS Washington University in St. Louis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8355-7490 In this collection of essays, we propose an opening for anthropological conversations about care. Keywords: anthropology; care; essays; recognition; university
• The Meme Radar: Locating Liberalism in Illiberal Hungary by Kallius, Annastiina; Adriaans, Rik (2022) - In Hungary in the late 2010s, however, political memes were not the prerogative of the far-right, which controlled both the government and public media, but rather of the oppositional minority that identified with liberalism. In a recent study of political memes in Singapore, Wee Yang Soh (2020) draws on linguistic anthropology to argue that, indeed, context determines what memes are, and their social implications. Keywords: anthropology; budapest; culture; european; fidesz; figure; government; hungarian; hungary; johanna; julian; liberalism; media; memes; new; orbán; party; politics; propaganda; regime; soros; state; students; university; youth
• The Long Turning: A Palestinian Refugee in Belgium by Allan, Diana (2020) - While camp life is reflexively associated with stasis and stagnation, dizzying mobility has also been central to the refugee experience, making forced movement both the cause and imagined solution to insecurity. For Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, decades of war—civil, regional, and internecine—have made the loss of home and its regeneration a way of life; rupture is routine, anticipated, prepared for. Keywords: anthropology; asylum; cultural; insecurity; life; refugee; suhaila
• The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology by Hong, Emily (2021) - Our increasingly overlapping exchanges continued after completing film production. Though I focus on ethnographic film, the “multiply produced” offers an approach to thinking about the broader asymmetrical dynamics of the ethnographic method in and beyond the field, once knowledge relations become sutured into material objects. Keywords: anthropologists; anthropology; autonomy; black; campaign; class; collaboration; commodity; dynamics; ethnographic; exchange; feminist; film; filmmaking; gift; living; milton; press; production; solidarity; stanley; university; value; wage; work
• Officer Safety Time: Police Scenario Training and Thinking Threat First by Katzenstein, Jessica (2025) - Some current scholarship on police training similarly treats it in isola- tion from the political functions of police, pronouncing the effectiveness of vari- ous pedagogies or suggesting methods for “culture” change. By contrast, ethnographers of police from less practice-ori- ented traditions have largely decentered reformist questions in favor of exploring political processes of subjectivization, such as how police trainings reproduce hegemonic masculinity (Kraska 1996; Prokos and Padavic 2002), generate so- cio-techno professional subjects (Akarsu 2018; Larkins and Durão 2023; Stalcup and Hahn 2016), translate human rights discourse (Babül 2017), socialize offi- cers into a “danger imperative” and construct police warriors (Sierra-Arévalo 2021; Simon 2023), script police violence (Anderson 2021; Aushana 2020), and mold a “transcendental postracial ‘blue identity’” founded in white supremacy (Beliso-De Jesús 2020, 146–47). Keywords: academy; anthropology; black; command; cultural; fear; officer; officer safety; police; policing; presence; press; recruits; reform; safety; safety time; scenario; state; subjunctive; temporality; threat; time; training; university; violence; � �
• Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies by Dharia, Namita Vijay (2021) - we see sensoriality as power, as a mode through which to articulate our voice and claim space in the world, then the imaginations, critiques, and experiences of body politics in Gurgaon constitute a battle over power in urban real estate economies. Linked to ideas of financial gain, corruption is fundamental to real estate economies. Keywords: american; anthropology; bodies; body; capital; caste; corruption; development; dominant; eating; economic; economy; estate; food; gurgaon; india; labor; land; new; politics; press; public; region; sewage; university; urban; work
• Erratum for “Walk This Way” by Anthropology, Cultural (2021) - © American Anthropological Association 2021. Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. Keywords: anthropology
• Why Do “Good” Pictures Matter in Anthropology? by Leon-Quijano, Camilo (2022) - The central argument is that good pictures in anthropology will always be relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory. Good pictures are experienced pictures. Keywords: anthropology; approach; camera; des; edwards; ethnographic; experience; field; good; history; image; paris; photograph; picture; practices; press; relationship; representation; sarcelles; use; visual; work
• “L’enfer, c’est les autres”: Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID-19 by Strong, Thomas; Trnka, Susanna; Wynn, L. L. (2021) - In considering how the state galvanized collective engagement in COVID-19 restrictions in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Trnka (2021) focuses on the mobilization of different publics in enacting ethical proximities that distance “others” while keeping “us” together in ways that simultaneously support, extend, and contravene physical distancing regulations. Rouse (2021) analyzes a similar axis of disadvantage in the United States to suggest a rethinking of anthropology’s critiques of biopolitics, indicating how those on the losing side of the “veil” between Black and white Americans struggle to assert their humanity, much less receive state care. Keywords: anthropology; care; covid-19; ethical; ethics; new; press; proximity; social; university
• Be Kind: Negotiating Ethical Proximities in Aotearoa/New Zealand during COVID-19 by Trnka, Susanna (2021) - “Negotiating Risks and Responsibilities during Lockdown: Ethical Reasoning and Affective Experience in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Given that lockdown requires adopting novel kinds of spatial relations, many of the activities over which New Zealanders reasoned and debated, subverted and supported, punished and surveilled concentrated on ethical proximities, not only in terms of maintaining distance but also keeping near that or those one deemed should be close.1 The maintenance of “proper distance” is an ethical act and an ordinary facet of social life (Silverstone 2003). Keywords: anthropology; covid-19; emergency; government; lockdown; new; police; press; state; susanna; trnka
• Virtuous Indecisiveness: Structural Moral Ambivalence and the Tentative Implementation of Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing in Japan by Ivry, Tsipy; Ogawa, Maki; Murotsuki, Jun (2023) - This explicit concern with evaluations of the quality of deliberations permeating the arena of NIPT genetic counseling speaks to current anthropological efforts to understand how people endeavor to live a moral life within their glocal moral worlds.5 Underlying the vibrant anthropological debates and disagreements about how to approach the ethical effectively is an understanding of people not as good or bad per se, but as having notions of good and bad according to which they evaluate themselves and others (Laidlaw 2013). This article addresses these questions while drawing on an ethnography of NIPT genetic counseling in Japanese hospitals contextualized within the moral ambivalence toward reproductive technologies traceable across social scales. Keywords: ambivalence; anthropology; counseling; counselors; decision; ethics; fetal; ivry; japanese; life; making; nipt; pregnancy; press; technologies; test; testing; university; women
• The Bioeconomy and the Birth of a “New Anthropology” by Andersson, Ruben (2022) - Attending to the self-analyses of those at the coalface of today’s growing bioeconomies may help researchers join the fight against encroachments across what may constitute the final frontier of capitalism: embodied human life and the inner sanctum of human vitality. Indeed, many of the bioeconomic processes treated in this Colloquy—especially those targeting vulnerable, exploitable human life—still draw sustenance from the “coloniality” of power relations surviving territorial colonialism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). Keywords: anthropology; bioeconomy; human; life; migrants; migration; new; surveillance; university
• #CiteBlackWomen by Makhulu, Anne-Maria; Smith, Christen (2022) - Although the numbers of Black women in anthropology are growing, and our contributions too (e.g., Fields 1995; McClaurin 2001; Harrison 2008; Bolles 2013; Williams 2018), Black women’s scholarship remains relatively invisible in the field as a whole. bell hooks (1991, 153) tells us that Black women have been perceived as “all body, no mind,” as “service workers” and never thinkers. Keywords: american; anthropological; anthropology; smith; university; women
• Refusing the God Trick: Engaging Black Women’s Knowledge by Harrison, Faye (2022) - His stories and seminal essays (e.g., Drake 1974, 1978, 1990) on the history of Black scholars in anthropology inspired me to work with colleagues to rescue Black anthropologists, including Drake himself, from oblivion and erasure from collective memory, syllabi, and citations (Harrison 2013, Harrison and Harrison 1999). The book’s preface describes her as a skillful ethnographer responsible for collecting all the data on Black women and for gathering and interpreting the evidence on the Black class system and miscegenation. Keywords: african; american; anthropology; black; davis; feminist; harrison; knowledge; new; press; university; women
• Black Feminist Citational Praxis and Disciplinary Belonging by Williams, Bianca (2022) - This type of intellectual apartheid and gendering of anthropological knowledge teaches graduate students a variety of lessons, including that the ethnographic isn’t theoretical, and that Black feminist anthropology is singularly useful for teaching about race and gender. It actively constructs a discipline that both benefits from Black feminist anthropology and simultaneously diminishes the value and ingenuity of its work.3 Furthermore, Black graduate students learn about their own belonging in the discipline as they are forced to read for dual degrees: one in the traditional anthropological canon (the white, mainstream discipline) and another in marginalized anthropologies, where Black (feminist) intellectual thought lives. Keywords: anthropologists; anthropology; belonging; citation; feminist; practices; scholars; women
• Citation, Erasure, and Violence: A Memoir by Smith, Christen (2022) - “Black women have been participants in higher education for more than a century, but they are almost totally absent from the research literature; rarely is the impact of racism and sexism on black women in academe examined” (Moses 1989). Of the 590 citations we counted in our sample of top-cited articles published in Cultural Anthropology, only 4 were Black women (0.67%), and only 2 were Black women anthropologists (0.33%).3 Even these figures paint only a partial picture of the problem. Keywords: academy; anthropology; citation; erasure; harrison; power; women; work
• Citing Black Women: From Citational Refusal to Recognition by Makhulu, Anne-Maria (2022) - Put differently, Black anthropology has not been recognized as anthropology since the very inception of the professional discipline (see Hurston 1990; Dunham 1994; Green on Primus 2001; cf. And much as Black feminism struggled not only to be heard but also to show the way for mainstream feminism—Lorde’s Sister Outsider being perhaps the most obvious example—Black anthropology struggles for recognition even as Black and other BIPOC anthropologists negotiate processes of double othering, working “Here” and “Elsewhere” as “Selves” and “Others. Keywords: american; anthropology; citation; duke; new; press; recognition; university; university press; women; work; york
• (Re)Writing Anthropology and Raising Our Voices from the Academic Margins by McKinson, Kimberley (2022) - We cannot overstate the critical importance of MSIs to minority student academic success. This means that anthropologists who work at MSIs have a unique opportunity to expose minority students to the discipline and offer to them a critical anthropological lens through which to understand their own experiences, as well as the world around them. Keywords: american; anthropology; institutions; margins; minority; percent; students
• The Margin Speaks: On the Radical Possibilities of Embodied Knowledge as Decolonial Pedagogy by McKinson, Kimberley (2022) - As a public, urban, and senior college within the City University of New York (CUNY), John Jay College predominantly serves minority students—47 percent Hispanic, 18 percent white, 17 percent Black, 15 percent Asian, and 3 percent other, as well as a significant number of veterans (450 enrolled) and first-generation students (45 percent of students enrolled). John Jay College is attended by students who have learned how to survive at the margins of society, as well as at the academic margins. Keywords: anthropology; auto; city; knowledge; new; romani; students
• Centering Black Women: A Black Feminist Critique of Mainstream Anthropology from the Margins of an HBCU by Williams, Erica (2022) - In our classrooms, we challenge the white male–dominated canon of anthropology, and propose a counter-canon in which Black women students can see themselves reflected. In Guy-Sheftall’s class, I was introduced to a feminism that explicitly and unapologetically centered Black women. Keywords: anthropology; canon; feminist; new; press; students; university; women
• Love as Enjoyment: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India by Awal, Akanksha (2025) - Therefore, many if not most of the one hundred middle-class and lower-middle-class young women and twenty men respondents in Ghaziabad, Hapur, and Meerut Districts insisted that they enjoyed without ever having pursued love (pyaar) leading to marriage.15 In moments of quiet reflection, though, they referred to enjoyment as a form of love without a future (see also Dave 2018) and entered arranged marriages. We met regularly in 2015 and 2016 when I was conducting ethnographic research on how education changes women’s ideas of love, marriage, and desirable futures. Keywords: anthropology; boyfriend; caste; class; cultural; enjoyment; family; future; ghaziabad; india; jyoti; kind; lead; love; marriage; middle; nagma; new; play; pleasure; press; priyanka; pyaar; relationships; time; university; women
• Opening Editorial by Córdoba Azcárate, Matilde; Corsín Jiménez, Alberto; Elyachar, Julia ; Nucho, Joanne; Simone, AbdouMaliq; Tironi, Manuel; Zia, Ather (2023) - Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. As members of the editorial collective of Cultural Anthropology, we stand as humbled witnesses to this crucial moment. Keywords: anthropological; anthropology; collective; editorial; editors; journal; scholars; work
• Borderlands as Barracks: Constructing a National Geography of Security in India by Ghosh, Sahana (2025) - I explore the social and spatial transformations entailed in making borderlands into barracks, sites where increasing numbers of BSF soldiers come to live and work through ever-expanding infrastructures: outposts with barracks, family quarters, roads to support vehicular movement, watchtowers, checkpoints, and the walls to protect them. In the east, the BOPs proved integral to making the “patchwork border,” demarcating and occupying national territory (van Schendel 2005) long before India started constructing a fence that has now become the iconic image of border security in this region. Keywords: anthropology; barracks; bengal; bop; border; borderlands; bsf; care; family; geography; india; infrastructures; institutions; military; national; press; security; soldiers; state; university; violence; work
• My Neighbor the Gringo: Commercialized Intimacies and Newcomer Hospitality in a Rio de Janeiro Favela by Angelini, Alessandro; Jones, Gareth A. (2025) - One threat is what anthropologist Angela Torresan (2020) describes as the reciprocity embedded in Vidigal residents’ struggles to improve their own conditions—melhorar a condição de vida—that lies in tension with a local moral economy, the tacit expectation that one person’s gain will bring wider community benefits. Andrés Luque-Ayala and Flávia Neves Maia (2019) examine Google’s digital mapping of Rio favelas project, including Vidigal, to argue that digital mapping makes favelas available as spaces of consumption, especially for tourism, and therefore builds what they call a kind of “digital governmentality.” Keywords: anthropology; brazil; brazilian; city; class; community; convivência; cultural; de janeiro; estate; favela; gentrification; hospitality; identity; janeiro; journal; márcia; new; place; press; project; property; residents; rio; rio de; social; space; term; university; vidigal
• Discarded Candidates: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere) by Jakimow, Tanya (2025) - Cultural Anthropology: Discarded Candidates: Waste as Metaphor in Local Government Elections in Australia (and Elsewhere) 276 Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 40, Issue 2, pp. 276-300, ISSN 0886-7356. Elections translate a pile of votes into a decision as to who will be the people’s representative (Crewe 2021), and by a process of elimination, produce discarded candidates. Keywords: anthropology; bessie; campaign; candidates; conversation; democracy; elections; electoral; money; new; practices; representative; systems; time; value; voters; waste; women
• Isha’s Wait: Money, Love, and Kinship in the Wake of Domestic Violence in India by Jaju, Garima (2025) - In the essay, I trace the ways in which different streams of money flow, un- flow, or mis-flow to and from Isha. This implies that the directions and manner of money flows are not just shaped by extant social systems but can also shape new social norms, orientations, rela- tions, and personhoods (Kwon 2015; Walsh 2003). Keywords: anthropology; city; cultural; family; flows; heera; home; husband; india; isha; kinship; love; maintenance; marriage; money; press; substance; university; violence; women
• Good Bureaucrats and God: The Ethical Labor of the Public by Hayat, Maira (2024) - When the issue remained unresolved after three attempts by the patwari, Iqbal sahib, and the zillehdar, Hamdan sahib, Azfar sahib announced the day and time of his visit: “I’m coming then, and will look into it myself,” he had said ominously to Iqbal sahib. The Ethical Labor of the Public MAIRA HAYAT University of Notre Dame https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0170-5742 It is another Saturday morning and the five of us—myself, Azfar sahib, and three other Irrigation Department bureaucrats—are sitting too close to each other in a small Suzuki, being driven to Janjattey (a village in Punjab) as part of proceedings in an irrigation-water dispute. Keywords: ahmadiyya; anthropology; azfar; azfar sahib; bureaucracy; bureaucratic; case; department; ethical; ethics; factory; god; irrigation; labor; law; muslim; pakistan; public; sahib; state; university; water; watercourse; work
• Fracking and Historicizing: On Deepened Time in West Texas by Hu, Cameron (2025) - As drilling turned the desert plain into a former reef, West Texas oil became logically finite. He proceeded to rehearse the reef theory of West Texas oil. Keywords: anthropology; basin; contingent; earth; fracking; geological; history; human; life; new; oil; past; permian; petroleum; press; process; reef; texas; time; university; west; west texas; world
• Good Digestion: The Metabolic Politics of Dutch Dairy Farming by Vogel, Else (2025) - In a press release and letter to parliament, the minister explained the rationale in simple input-output terms: “Generally, dairy cows in the Netherlands are fed more protein than the animal needs. By comparing the current food intake of dairy cows with these proposed limits, the committee could fairly easily calculate how much nitrogen emissions (in the form of ammonia) would be reduced by a lower protein content of feed. Keywords: anthropology; cows; crisis; dairy; digestion; dutch; farmers; farming; farms; feed; food; good; health; human; life; measure; metabolic; metabolic politics; milk; netherlands; nitrogen; politics; production; protein; relations; rumen; ways
• Erratum for "Resisting Alternative Images" by Editorial Team, Cultural Anthropology (2025) - Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license. Reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. Keywords: anthropology

• Cast Aside: Boredom, Downward Mobility, and Homelessness in Post-Communist Bucharest by O'Neill, Bruce (2014) - Boredom is a traumatizing social relationship born out of having been cast aside, and it materializes through the practices and shelter infrastructure that keeps homeless persons sitting at the margins of the city.11 Again, boredom abounds amongst the homeless because they are excluded from the consumer-based activities and spaces that are now central to contemporary city life.12 It is little wonder that the trauma of downward mobility in Romania takes meaningful shape around the denial of consumption. To be sure, boredom also exerted a deathly dull force upon homeless persons living on the street. Keywords: boredom; bucharest; city; communism; consumption; day; economy; homeless; life; nescafé; new; press; public; radu; romania; romanians; sense; shelter; state; university; work; world
• Humanity/Plan; or, On the "Stateless" Today (Also Being an Anthropology of Global Health) by Rees, Tobias (2014) - They transformed a given (all humans constitute the totality of humanity) into a provincial, historical, contingent phenomenon, thereby engendering the possibility of an anthropology of humanity; one that grounds in an ethnographic exploration of a set of actors—the practitioners of humanity—that, despite its extraordinary significance, is usually nowhere accounted for, one that calls for a meticulous epistemology of humanity plans (Chakrabarty 2000). Gehlen 1973; Kohn 1944; Lévi-Strauss 1952; Niezen 2008).8 What I found as well, and this came as a major surprise, was that most of the authors who first wrote about humanity actually understood their texts as humanity plans (Krajewski 2006). Keywords: biological; enterprise; form; global; health; humanity; humans; nation; new; plan; politics; press; research; state; stateless; university; world
• Working Mis/Understandings: The Tangled Relationship between Kinship, Franco-Malagasy Binational Marriages, and the French State by Cole, Jennifer (2014) - These husbands generally complain that changes in French society have made French women “egotistical” (trop égoïste) or “too individual” (trop individuelle), by which they usually mean that women are too materialistic and no longer interested in fulfilling traditional gender roles within the household, a complaint that echoes those leveled at modern French women after World War I (Camiscioli 2009). Fearful that they will be accused of using marriage to obtain citizenship and its material benefits, Malagasy women need to explain their ongoing commitments to their Malagasy kin in ways that their husbands and French families will recognize and interpret as morally legitimate. Keywords: families; family; france; french; husbands; kin; kinship; madagascar; malagasy; marriage; press; relations; state; university; vola; wives; women; working
• Becoming a Force in the Zone: Hedonopolitics, Masculinity, and the Quest for Respect on Haiti’s Streets by Kivland, Chelsey L. (2014) - In this article, I argue that insofar as displays of good feeling embodied political power, the production of programs full of feeling—what Feld (1988) would call “feelingful” programs—represented efforts to perform sovereign agency and power. Of greater importance was the way it allowed them to act as pleasure providers for the zone, and in turn, to make a show of political power. Keywords: base; beach; day; feeling; force; good; haiti; leaders; male; men; new; party; pleasure; power; press; respect; sovereignty; state; street; university; women; yves; zapzap; zone
• Making Art from Uncertainty: Magic and Its Politics in South African Rugby by Rubin, Joshua D. (2014) - In response to the spontaneous, unprecedented situations that rugby continually offers up, then, Bulls players are instructed to respond with safe, predictable actions. It is no coincidence, then, that the words Bulls players and management use most regularly to describe their style include dominant, precise, and structured. Keywords: adorno; africa; apartheid; bulls; danie; maak; magic; players; press; rugby; south; sport; state; team; uncertainty; university; vas
• The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media by Makley, Charlene (2015) - These inherently intersubjective dynamics would move us away from taking Tibetan immolators (living or dead) as singular voices and entail instead a consideration of the mediated addressivity of their performances (Bakhtin 1981; Lempert 2012; Lempert and Silverstein 2012). As such, the bodies of Tibetan immolators speak to a highly discomfiting, indeed horrifying, necropolitics at the heart of Sino-Tibetan relations, the power and efficacy of violence and untimely death in the face of competing claims to Buddhist compassion or state-led humanitarianism. Keywords: bodies; body; chinese; death; immolation; immolators; lama; life; mass; media; monks; new; phuntshok; prc; protest; protesters; self; state; tibetan; violence
• Totalitarian Tears: Does the Crowd Really Mean It? by Mazzarella, William (2015) - Demick, Barbara 2010 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea New York: Spiegel and Grau. As absorbing and often disturbing as this literature is, I realized early on that the integrity of my analysis demanded that I rigorously resist any temptation to mine it for the truth about North Korea.5 At the risk of stating the obvious, and out of respect for actually existing North Koreans, I must emphasize that I made this choice because my essay is not about North Korea. Keywords: crowds; crying; december; jong; kim; korea; koreans; mass; new; north; north korea; press; state; subject; tears; university; university press; world; york
• Export-Quality Martyrs: Roman Catholicism and Transnational Labor in the Philippines by Bautista, Julius (2015) - In this sense, I will show how acts of transnational OFW sacrifice—in their associations with Christ-like martyrdom—are effectively endorsed by prominent voices from within both the church and the state as a form of pious mimesis. I emphasize here the corporeal dimension of this linkage by examining OFW labor in terms of embodied comportments of self-discipline, particularly those inculcated in the process of recruitment and predeployment training. Keywords: catholic; church; economy; export; filipino; flagellation; labor; migrant; new; ofws; overseas; pampanga; passion; philippines; press; ritual; sacrifice; self; state; university; workers
• Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs by Lyons, Kristina Marie (2015) - These kinds of farms that fall in line with conventional state-based forms of property acquisition can easily slip away, working against the continuation of rural life in the territory. Killing is posed within a “future perfect” tense (Povinelli 2011a, 167) as a necessary redemptive mode of birth that will bring new beings and domains of social life—in this case, the geopolitical intervention of liberal moralities, such as rule of law, culture of legality, public health, and licit capitalist-based economies—into existence. Keywords: amazonian; coca; colombia; conditions; death; development; farmers; farms; human; life; living; plants; policy; practices; press; putumayo; seeds; selva; soils; state; territory; university; war; world
• Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia by Pérez, Federico (2016) - She stressed the technical acumen of these hypothetical elders, implying that they would resolve all confusion and vagaries of legal practice by establishing the city’s definitive legal truths. In Bogotá, the putative materiality of the legal topography—its sedimented quality as a corpus that must be excavated—emerges as a strategic idiom that allows experts to obscure and contest legal practice. Keywords: archaeology; authority; bogotá; building; bureaucrats; city; department; development; experts; javier; law; laws; new; planning; practice; rafael; regulations; state; urban
• Geology, Potentiality, Speculation: On the Indeterminacy of First Oil by Weszkalnys, Gisa (2015) - I show that first oil is a protracted and precarious achievement based on a speculative epistemology and reliant on specific technical, legal, and commercial practices and devices with surprisingly incongruous effects. FIRST OIL The phenomenon of first oil makes the notion of indeterminate potential readily apparent. Keywords: capital; company; drilling; erhc; exploration; future; hellinger; industry; investment; markets; matter; new; oil; pause; petroleum; potential; potentiality; production; príncipe; resources; state; stp; são; tomé; university; value; years
• Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey by Tambar, Kabir (2015) - About ten minutes into his discussion, Demirtaş (2013) indicated that this sort of state violence did not only apply to Kurds. For Demirtaş, many of those looking from the debris of Gezi’s barricades were members of the Turkish majority who might not have previously viewed state violence in the Kurdish provinces with much sympathy or comprehension.2 To look from Gezi, in the assessment of Demirtaş, was to be granted the opportunity for historical insight. Keywords: 2013; demirtaş; gezi; history; kurdish; majority; minority; mothers; nation; new; police; press; protests; public; speech; state; state violence; turkey; university; violence
• Framed by Freedom: Emancipation and Oppression in Post-Fordist Thailand by Sopranzetti, Claudio (2017) - Despite her laudable attempt to connect conceptions of personal freedom with larger economic, social, and political restructurings, her reading—following an argument proposed by Nikolas Rose—concludes that freedom is reworked from an emancipating force to an oppressive one, one in which subjects are obliged to take part. 12. These echoes are deliberate and, while they cannot be further explored in the context of this article, provide a backdrop and an implicit comparison to my argument.17 Even though they take specific forms in different contexts, these apparent contradictions largely revolve around allowing free flows and activities only insofar as they can be transformed into legible aggregate flows, and externalizing social relations—such as exploitation or job security—to individual entrepreneurship by fostering individual freedom. Keywords: adun; bangkok; boon; capital; control; crisis; drivers; freedom; itsaraphāp; labor; life; motorcycle; new; press; state; thailand; university; village; workers; york
• Refusal as Act, Refusal as Abstention by Weiss, Erica (2016) - In contrast to public military refusal, abstention avoids the state’s resistance trap, which dooms public refusal to be claimed and co-opted by the state. While public military refusal can be understood as resistance, refusal as abstention should be understood as an affirmative investment in another possibility. Keywords: abstention; military; public; refusal; refusers; state
• Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction by McGranahan, Carole (2016) - We now find ourselves in a different time, engaging with a different sort of ethnographic refusal, a time in which interpretive refusal might actually illuminate ethnography rather than flatten it (Simpson 2007, 2014; see also TallBear 2013). These theses are not discrete, but instead blur and blend into one another despite being generated out of four distinct cases—military refusal in Israel, vaccine refusal in the United States, citizenship refusal by Tibetan refugees in South Asia, and ethnographic refusals by Kahnawà:ke Mohawks in North America. Keywords: press; refusal; resistance; simpson; state; university
• To Revive an Abundant Life: Catholic Science and Neoextractivist Politics in Peru’s Mantaro Valley by Graeter, Stefanie (2017) - I knew little about Mantaro Revive at the time, only that it was connected to a transnational network of organizations campaigning against lead contamination in the nearby city of La Oroya. Alongside scientific measurements, members of Mantaro Revive held policy workshops in urban centers and remote hamlets, sustained health programs in La Oroya, and attended political events in Lima. Keywords: archbishop; catholic; church; company; environmental; exposure; jiménez; knowledge; lead; life; mantaro; mining; oroya; peru; politics; practices; press; project; research; revive; rights; science; state; study; university
• Triggering Change: Police Homicides, Community Healing, and the Emergent Eventfulness of the New Civil Rights by Raschig, Megan (2017) - Today’s New Civil Rights movement gestures toward an increasingly perceptible and intolerable critical node of contention: the enervation, disposability, and ungrievability of black life, and the institutionalization of a racist and dehumanizing gaze that perceives black life as an inherent threat to other life in general, and to white privilege in particular (Day 2015; Butler 2015). HEALING HISTORY AND RECALIBRATING ETHICAL ACTION IN SALINAS As I would learn, Hernández’s officer-involved death provoked a temporal tripwire for both Shi and Tara, in the sense that what happened to make them stop and keep them at that corner was not just one particular death, but a sudden, jangling cacophony of many other deaths already endured and left unresolved, lives shrugged off or taken by the police. Keywords: colectiva; conditions; death; east; healing; homicides; life; lives; new; police; protest; salinas; shi; state; tara; time; triggers; world; yesi
• Another Life is Possible: Black Fugitivity and Enclosed Places by Sojoyner, Damien M. (2017) - Rooted in a liberal tradition of social progress, the current realities of Black education are mired in a brutal system of punitive containment and curricular evisceration that I argue forms the basis of an enclosed place. Framed by the backdrop of unrelenting liberal narratives of individualism, upward social mobility, and race-blind/neutral school governing mandates, the article reckons with the material and ideological conditions produced within sites of Black education that belie the mythical facade of advancement, inclusion, and civility within liberal discursive practices. Keywords: angeles; california; class; devon; education; forms; fugitivity; los; marley; places; press; refusal; school; state; students; violence; youth
• Unruly Affects: Attempts at Control and All That Escapes from an American Mental Health Court by Cooper, Jessica (2018) - Keeping Harriet around would showcase the impasses of the court’s logic, those parts of Harriet’s story over which the court lost narrative control. It was at the end of the second day that I spent with Harriet—before she threatened suicide, but after she had told me that court supervision “feels like death”—that Keywords: authority; bakhtin; chronotope; court; evan; harriet; health; health court; jurisdiction; law; life; mental; mother; movement; space; state; time; university
• Reflections on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism: Lessons from Native North America by Sturm, Circe (2017) - We can extend this list to include indigeneity as well, understood here not merely as a distinct racial, social, or cultural identity, but rather as an explicitly political subjectivity tied to the experience of living in the shadow of settler colonialism with an everyday sense of ongoing territorial invasion and dispossession (Rifkin 2009).2 By maintaining these distinctions in our analyses of modern forms of biopower and following their through line, if you will, we are able to recognize not only how such distinctions are used to target particular kinds of human beings for bare life but also how they condition other forms of sovereign violence, such as sexual violence in the case of gender, slavery in the case of race, and settler colonialism in the case of indigeneity (Simpson 2011).3 With indigeneity and settler colonialism as added lenses, we see that policies intent on social and political death, such as assimilation, missionization, relocation, allotment, termination, and even political incorporation via citizenship, were all designed to eliminate indigenous assertions of sovereignty over the land. Reflections on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism Reflections on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism: Lessons from Native North America CIRCE STURM University of Texas at Austin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3300-7965 Any consideration of what sovereignty has come to mean in Native North America, as a conceptual framework that names a particular kind of lived indigenous experience, has to be understood within the context of settler colonialism. Keywords: colonialism; forms; native; press; settler; sovereignty; state; university
• Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond by Bishara, Amahl (2017) - Palestinians and many others in the Middle East see evidence every day of the essential violence at the heart of state sovereignty, that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (Mbembe 2003, 11). Other major state and organizational donors that visibly fund infrastructure like roads also signpost the gaps in Palestinian sovereignty (A. Bishara 2015), even as the funding of the PA’s security apparatus by the United States and other countries (see Sayigh 2011) has given it attributes of a police state without the sovereignty. Keywords: forms; israel; new; palestinian; press; resistance; sovereignty; state; university; university press; violence
• Rethinking Sovereignty through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics by Clarke, Kamari Maxine (2017) - The answers to these questions raise considerations about the consequences of such new technologies—especially as we specify which bodies, and through what body politics. Rethinking Sovereignty through Hashtag Publics Rethinking Sovereignty through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE Carleton University http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4910-548X Modern conceptions of sovereignty have come a long way, and anthropology has been centrally engaged in multidisciplinary conversations about the nature of sovereignty, including those related to notions of political authority and reconfigurations of body politics. Keywords: authority; body; new; power; sovereignty; state; violence
• Shock Humor: Zaniness and the Freedom of Permanent Improvisation in Urban Tanzania by Degani, Michael (2018) - “In their purest form,” Daniel Harris (2000, 117) observes, zany comedies are “structureless journeys through worlds of dangerous and volatile objects. The presence of zany characters and situations in cities like Dar es Salaam certainly stands as a corrective to the Eurocentrism of much critical and cultural theory. Keywords: comedy; dar; electricians; electricity; freedom; improvisation; issa; kishoka; labor; life; new; play; power; press; salaam; sense; state; tanesco; university; work; working; zaniness; zany
• Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide by Hannig, Anita (2019) - In carving out a form of willful death that sits in a category of its own, activists can gesture to the complex medico-technical, bureaucratic, and legal assemblage that has come to govern assisted deaths and that has led to their routinization in states that permit them. To better appreciate how aid-in-dying has been positioned against suicide as a form of intentional death, the next section revisits key approaches in the anthropological study of suicide, followed by a brief historical framing of assisted death in the broader context of the medicalization of dying. Keywords: act; agency; aid; assisted; death; dignity; dying; end; illness; law; life; medicine; oregon; patients; right; self; state; suicide; united
• Kin-Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants by Miller, Alyssa (2018) - In Tunisian families, sons are expected to treat their fathers with respect, and as a consequence, their relationship is often formal and distant (White 2004). While I do not wish to suggest that Muslim families around the Mediterranean conform to any particular type, the intrafamily relationships described by White ring true to my understanding of Tunisian family dynamics. Keywords: bilal; combatants; faisal; families; family; home; iqbal; jihad; kin; kinship; life; mother; muhammad; national; new; press; public; ratta; son; state; syria; thoraya; tunisian; university; work
• Directing the Future of Gene Therapy in Cyprus: Breakthroughs, Subjunctivities, and the Pragmatics of Narrative by Kyriakides, Theodoros (2018) - Gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into the human body to replace mutations causing disorders (Addison 2017). This article, stemming from research conducted with a thalassemia patients’ association in Cyprus from July 2012 to September 2013, explores how the political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthroughs in gene therapy is harnessed to particular political objectives and narratives of the future. Keywords: breakthrough; cing; cypriot; cyprus; future; gene; gene therapy; health; hope; new; patients; pta; state; subjunctivity; thalassemia; therapy; time; treatment; uncertainty
• On the Importance of Wolves by O’Neill, Kevin Lewis (2018) - Tomás blushed as the pastor directed my attention to Manuel. “This is a little more difficult to explain,” he admitted, “but Manuel smoked marijuana, and now he believes that angels visit him.” Keywords: care; center; christian; city; drug; guatemala; health; hugo; life; manuel; new; pastor; press; rehabilitation; roof; sheep; state; university; wolf; wolves; years
• “I’m building a wall around my uterus”: Abortion Politics and the Politics of Othering in Trump’s America by Andaya, Elise (2019) - The image provokes a consideration of walls and reproductive politics in Trump’s America. Using walls and uteruses as points of departure, I offer some initial reflections on the increasingly punitive nature of reproductive politics in the United States and its relation to emergent state and national preoccupations. Keywords: abortion; politics; reproduction; rights; state; trump; walls
• Rights, Inequality, and Afro-Descendant Heritage in Brazil by Escallón, Maria Fernanda (2019) - Specifically, I analyze the policies protecting contemporary maroon descendants and sites to reveal why Palmares residents making claims on their land and heritage fall outside of state recognition. Though the park’s touristic success is debatable, the importance of Quilombo dos Palmares as an icon of Brazilian culture continues to grow. Keywords: afro; brazil; brazilian; communities; cultural; dos; dos palmares; groups; heritage; history; inhabitants; land; multiculturalism; national; palmares; park; policies; press; quilombo; recognition; residents; rights; serra; site; situation; state; university
• Masculinity, Migration, and Forced Conscription in the Syrian War by Monroe, Kristin V. (2020) - Rami’s blunt and plaintive “I’m a shisha boy” was one of the many moments in my conversations with Syrian men living and working in Doha that cut through the ways we commonly think about the long war in Syria. By looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, I develop an argument about how, although they avoid fighting by going to work in Qatar, the lives of a group of Syrian men remain defined by conscription. Keywords: age; conflict; conscription; doha; gulf; home; labor; life; lives; men; migration; military; qatar; regime; service; state; syria; syrians; time; university; war; work; working
• Of Broken Seals and Broken Promises: Attributing Intention at the IAEA by Weichselbraun, Anna (2019) - Global actors interpreted the fact that Iran broke IAEA seals as an act of “brinkmanship” (Beeston 2005), signaling that the country no longer wanted to cooperate with the ostensibly generous international efforts to limit its nuclear program (“Offer by Europe Would Give Iran Nuclear Future” In a period of nineteen months, the Iranians removed IAEA seals from two of their facilities three times and replaced them once. Keywords: agency; august; board; governors; iaea; infrastructure; inspectors; iran; material; meaning; metal; new; nuclear; press; safeguards; seals; sign; state; time; university; uranium
• Immigrant Sensibilities in Tech Worlds: Sensing Hate, Capturing Dissensus by Amrute, Sareeta (2020) - To wit, IT professionals from India and China are both targeted for harassment within a political climate increasingly hostile to immigrants as job takers and separated out as upper class (and within the South Asian context and often for themselves, upper-caste subjects) from other Asian immigrants, as well as Latinx, Native, and Black bodies (Lye 2004; Muñoz 2007; Chun 2011; Halewood 2011; Amrute 2020). I show how forms of evidence about hate incidents circulate in Asian immigrant communities. Keywords: amrita; asian; capital; crimes; dissensus; distribution; fanon; green; hate; immigrant; incidents; labor; law; new; philip; politics; press; rancière; seattle; sensate; senses; sensible; state; tech; university; work
• Exhuming Dead Persons: Forensic Science and the Making of Post-fascist Publics in Spain by Rubin, Jonah S. (2020) - Although forensic exhumations produce vast quantities of new information, they cannot, strictly speaking, confirm the stories families tell about their loved ones. This essay examines how Spanish activists use forensic exhumations to transform the political status of Franco’s victims. Keywords: activists; dead; democracy; dignity; exhumations; franco; grave; history; human; justice; legal; mass; memory; new; personhood; persons; press; public; remains; rights; science; spain; state; university; victims; violence
• A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands by Bakker Kellogg, Sarah (2021) - Twenty-first-century Dutch cosmopolitan nationalism is today explicitly staked on the public discourse of normen en waarden, reasserted by Prime Minister J. P. Balkenende in 2002 in an effort to restabilize Dutch social relations after the assassination of the anti-Islamic provocateur and politician Pim Fortuyn. Instead, she identified Syriac Orthodox difference with Muslim difference, which she, in turn, constructed as a psychological problem to be solved by surrendering “traditional” parental authority over individual socialization to the state. Keywords: body; christian; christianity; cultural; culture; difference; dutch; ethical; ethics; europe; european; history; life; muslim; netherlands; new; orthodox; politics; power; press; race; relations; religion; reproduction; social; state; syriac; university
• Utopias of Oil: Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Ambition in the U.S. Oil and Gas Industry by High, Mette Marie (2022) - ABSTRACT At a time of a “private equity oil rush,” this essay explores how oil industry entrepreneurs with ambitions of setting up their own oil-production companies are encouraged to “dream big”—yet are ultimately disciplined and let down—by private equity finance in the state of Colorado in the United States. During the period of oil capital, this expansion and reproduction was fueled by cheap and readily available sources of oil.” 8. Keywords: capital; capitalism; colorado; companies; company; energy; entrepreneurs; equity; firms; gas; gas industry; industry; investment; investors; management; mark; money; new; oil; state; time; work; world
• Sovereignty in Drag: On Fakes, Foreclosure, and Unbecoming States by Bryant, Rebecca (2021) - Believers in what is usually called the declaratory view of state sovereignty, such as Denktaş, would argue that something that looks and acts like a state is obviously a state. Being a strong believer in state sovereignty himself, this is also likely how Denktaş understood the agitated caller’s expressions of disbelief. Keywords: bryant; butler; citizens; cypriots; cyprus; engagement; flag; greek; island; north; press; pseudo; real; recognition; roc; south; sovereignty; state; trnc; turkish; university
• The Spy Who Came In from the South by Li, Darryl (2020) - Many of these threads proved difficult to trace further or verify, which is why I was rather startled when Muhammad (not his real name, of course) in straightforward terms told me about having been a spy. We met in a detention center for migrants outside Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Muhammad was fighting his deportation to Algeria, the country of his birth, after having been labeled a threat to national security. Keywords: bosnia; intelligence; muhammad; spy; state; university
• Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India by Govindrajan, Radhika (2021) - Kanha was one of the most charismatic faces of a contemporary gau-raksha (cow-protection) movement, rooted in Hindu supremacist ideology, that has, over the past decade, authorized and enacted unremitting, sometimes fatal violence against Dalits (formerly known as “Untouchables”), Muslims, and other religious minorities identified as threats to the cow and a supposedly beleaguered Hindu nation that can only be united and secure under the maternal leadership of Gau-Mata (Gundimeda 2009; Contractor 2018; Govindrajan 2018; Imran 2018; Adcock and Govindrajan 2019). As historians have noted, this project of cow-protection, with its emphasis on the sacred inviolability of the cow’s life, stood at odds with everyday rural economies in which cattle rearing, trade, slaughter, and consumption were inextricably intertwined (Chowdhury 1996; Keywords: cow; cows; gau; govindrajan; hindu; india; labor; love; mata; milk; mother; nation; politics; prem; press; protection; rakshaks; seva; state; university; violence; women; work
• The Weightless State: PowerPoint and the Everyday Work of Making Senegal Matter by Melly, Caroline (2023) - As they stashed piles of papers from view, downloaded and circulated PowerPoint files, selected subdued colors and standard fonts, connected cords, entered passwords, tightly framed bullet points, and finessed their oral presentations, APIX staff members made Senegal matter in specific and consequential ways—they gave the small African state substantive form, and they made that form worthy of attention. Moussa was excited to be able to translate his skills in marketing and design into state work—tinkering with layouts for promotional materials, helping produce radio advertisements, collaborating on translations, and, of course, assembling PowerPoint presentations. Keywords: africa; agency; apix; colleagues; elhadji; information; investment; investors; material; members; new; office; paper; powerpoint; presentations; press; senegal; senegalese; slides; staff; state; time; transparency; university; ways; work
• Predatory Fleas, Sterile Flies, and the Settlers : Agricultural Infrastructure and the Challenge of Alien-Native Dichotomies in Israel/Palestine by Shani, Liron (2023) - I show agricultural infrastructure to be a political enterprise: it establishes hierarchical boundaries between communities and strengthens land control. Yet a focus on the various dimensions of agricultural infrastructure within a given context of settler colonialism contributes a more nuanced approach than forcing dichotomous contrasts between alien versus native, settler versus local. Keywords: agriculture; alien; arava; colonialism; control; desert; flies; fly; growers; human; infrastructure; insects; israel; land; native; non; palestine; project; region; settlement; settler; species; state
• Necropolitics versus Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic by Rouse, Carolyn M. (2021) - Put starkly, whites in May protested against state biopolitics; Blacks protested against state necropolitics (Mbembe 2003). The juxtapositions reveal how even proximate experiences with state power are akin to a palimpsest, with stories by white Americans typically effacing those of Black Americans. Keywords: americans; biopolitics; blacks; covid-19; life; power; state
• The Struggle For Health: Medical Brokerage and the Power of Care in Brazil’s Amazon Estuary by Abel, Matthew (2022) - While Brazil contributed disproportionately to the emerging science of public health, the popular benefits of new technologies were often stymied by policies that limited access to care in an effort to institutionalize new opportunities for private medical markets (Paim 2008). [public health; unequal exchange; biopolitics; Amazon; Brazil] RESUMO Este artigo aborda a relação entre a saúde e o aviamento: um sistema de servidão por dívida que estruturou a economia mercantil ao longo do rio Amazonas durante os séculos XIX e XX. Keywords: abaetetuba; access; amazon; amazonian; american; aviamento; brazil; brokerage; camila; care; century; day; elites; government; health; medicine; merchants; new; power; press; public; riverine; seekers; social; state; sus; system; university; world
• Orders of Protection: Feminist Lessons in Anti-Privatization and Authoritarianism from South Africa by Gillespie, Kelly (2022) - During apartheid, township-based activists worked hard to direct anger and resentment into the anti-apartheid struggle, so as to transform neighborhood violence and insecurity into political action, especially to draw young people into forms of social life and political mobilization that enabled a different set of possibilities and imaginations about how to live and how to relate to one’s context. Even her husband, Lucas, and their two children had been pulled into the organization Felicia runs to halt the high levels of domestic violence in Lavender Hill, a fifty-year-old neighborhood on the Flats of Cape Town.2 Keywords: africa; apartheid; court; felicia; feminist; hill; home; lavender; life; order; police; politics; private; privatization; protection; public; south; state; university; violence; women; work
• Speculative Undergrounds: Oil’s Absent Presence, Neo-imperial Nationalisms, and Earth Politics in Turkey by Oguz, Zeynep (2023) - As such, I bring together ethnographic research on two seemingly unrelated topics concerning contemporary Turkey: Sensationalized headlines like “Hope of Oil Discovery,” “Mobil’s Abandoned Wells Leak Oil,” and “Citizens Demand: Unplug Our Future” continued to link petroleum seeps and abandoned wells to an anticipated yet obstructed future of oil discovery and wealth that oil’s absent presence fostered in contemporary Turkey. Keywords: erdoğan; expiration; history; lausanne; life; mosul; murat; neo; new; oil; ottoman; petroleum; politics; presence; press; public; speculations; state; treaty; turkey; underground; university; world
• Corporations and States: A Customer-Service Corporation inside the Punjab State Police by Hull, Matthew (2022) - While there are many women in the Punjab police and even police stations staffed entirely by women, men far outnumber women in police service. Second, they were to frame the issue of satisfaction in relation to police service rather than to the events themselves and/or the larger socio-political situation. Keywords: actors; case; center; complaint; coordinators; customer; gupta; helpline; india; new; officers; police; punjab; satisfaction; service; software; staff; state; system; university; women; work; ziqitza
• The Promise of Fog Capture: Ground-Touching Clouds as a Material (Im)Possibility in Peru by Ojani, Chakad (2023) - In brief, fog catchers consist of large plastic nets situated perpendicular to the direction of the wind, filtering the regular inflow of coastal fog and funneling it into a water tank for later distribution (Figure 1). Once the NGO had secured funding from a Dutch water foundation, they collaboratively helped install a series of fog catchers a ten-minute walk from Rosa’s house. Keywords: alejandro; capture; carlos; catchers; city; failure; family; fog; fog catchers; infrastructure; lima; material; ngo; peru; press; project; residents; rosa; state; university; villa; water
• Bioeconomy and Migrants’ Lives in Libya by Achtnich, Marthe (2022) - New to Tripoli, Semere and Tigisti did not have strong social networks with other migrants in the city. Eventually, through other migrants who had already left for Europe, Semere and Tigisti found another place to stay. Keywords: bioeconomy; libya; life; migrants; semere; state
• Bureaucraft: Statemakers in Amman and Baghdad by Martínez, José Ciro; Sirri, Omar (2023) - Iraq’s vehicular geographies are closely implicated in checkpoint labor and soldierly competence. Put differently, checkpoint labor is liminal. Keywords: 2013; amman; baghdad; bakers; bread; bureaucracy; checkpoints; dough; goods; government; knowledge; labor; mazen; najib; practices; press; sadiq; security; soldiers; state; university; water; work
• Gaining Voice through Injury: Voice and Corporeality in Animal Rights Activism in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico by Sandoval-Cervantes, Iván (2023) - In this article, I highlight the relationship among the construction of voice, animal bodies, and the Mexican justice system. Injured animal bodies, thus, gain a voice that seems unreachable for non-injured animal bodies: their injuries allow their particular stories of abuse to be told. Keywords: abuse; alicia; animal; animalistas; bodies; body; canis; case; city; ciudad; dogs; eco; human; justicia; juárez; mexico; relationship; rescue; state; violence; voice
• The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek: On the Problem of Diaspora, the Economy of Agonism, and the Extimacy of Relation-Making by Hothi, Randeep (2024) - Under the moral-juridical rubric of so-called hate crimes, liberal discourses characteristically understand such violence as matters of criminal trespass, an individuated transgression against and contrary to law, rather than political violence, the structural trespass of the juridico-political regime itself (see Mamdani 2015, 63). For Bal, martyrs instantiate a resistance against state violence that makes possible and conduces the practice of tradition. Keywords: activists; agonism; american; assembly; community; diaspora; gurdwara; hall; images; langar; making; martyrdom; martyrs; politics; press; sikh; singh; social; solidarity; state; tradition; united; university; violence; white
• Volumes: The Politics of Calculation in Contemporary Peruvian Amazonia by Romero Dianderas, Eduardo (2024) - Instead, I focus on the “calculation grammars” that inform tropical timber volumes in Loreto as a way to unveil the affective and political dimensions of seemingly mechanistic technical practices in a larger context of intense technocratic transformation (see Ballestero 2015, 266.) In what follows, I first discuss the rise of timber volumetrics, the practice of measuring timber volumes, in modern scientific forestry, and examine a particular volumetric formula, the Doyle Formula, which eventually would come to embroil itself in the economic and political life of Loreto’s tropical logging industry during the twentieth century. Keywords: abstractions; calculation; century; doyle; forest; formula; industry; logging; logs; loreto; pancho; peru; smalian; state; timber; tropical; volumes; volumetric
• Flowers of Deception: The Expert’s Nostalgia for a Future’s Past and its Occlusion of Agrarian Labor by Kurian, Amrita (2024) - This is because, although a relatively minor crop by both acreage and number of livelihoods sustained, FCV tobacco remains highly lucrative and contributes significant revenues to tobacco farmers, traders, manufacturers, and the Government of India.3 Thus, despite the stagnation of the global tobacco market in recent decades, India is one of the top three producers of the crop, alongside countries like China and Brazil. Thus, tobacco farmers make for the main recipients of the Board’s knowledge and extension services, which aim to produce a high-quality, standardized FCV tobacco crop for the market and, in doing so, to lift farm incomes. Keywords: andhra; board; caste; crop; economy; experts; farmers; fcv; fcv tobacco; garu; government; indian; laborers; land; market; new; nostalgia; orobanche; postcolonial; prakasam; press; state; tobacco; tobacco board; tobacco farmers; university; work
• The Afterlife of Sacrifice in the Kurdish Movement by Düzel, Esin (2024) - Building on this literature, I focus on the moral confusions and uncertainties around the new political project: How to translate the value of revolutionary sacrifices into the democratic struggle to remake the social and the political? How would this-worldly correspondence to revolutionary sacrifice be identified within the everyday life in Diyarbakır? Keywords: afterlives; death; debt; everyday; families; forms; gift; kurdish; life; martyrs; movement; new; pkk; politics; revolution; revolutionaries; sacred; sacrifice; state; struggle; temporalities; time; turkey; turkish; university; value
• Reactive Regulation: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations by Jonnalagadda, Indivar (2025) - That the data of urban property relations was not mapped struck me for two reasons: First, the government itself claimed that regularization would prove a tool to translate irregular land claims into clear and governable units. So instead of attempting this digitization, a pragmatic thinness and uncertainty about urban property is constitutive of the documentary practices of everyday administration. Keywords: city; claims; department; governance; government; hyderabad; land; making; new; offices; planning; press; processes; property; records; regularization; regulation; relations; revenue; state; university; urban
• Delivering the State: State-Making through Maternal Health “Care” in Bangladeshi Public Maternal Health Spaces by Perkins, Janet (2025) - I argue that rather than being uncaring, health care delivered by providers in public maternal settings is structured by state-oriented imperatives to provide “services” (sheba), though not necessarily intimate care (jotno) to non-state heath service recipients. In official policy discourse, the term sheba is paired with shastyo, health, for shastyo sheba, and thereby privileges the term health service for the typical English use of health care. Keywords: bangladesh; birth; care; delivery; enactments; government; health; health care; health service; hospital; jotno; kushtia; labor; private; providers; public; rima; room; service; settings; sheba; state; women
• Fugitive Kinships: Imperial Legacies, Wayward Acts, and Queer Bonds among Filipino Migrants in Japan by Ikeuchi, Suma (2025) - As the Japanese historian Fujiwara Kiichi (2011, 5) argued, however, postwar Japan—defeated and occupied by the U.S.-led Allied Forces—adopted an American-style approach of “unofficial empire (hiseishiki no teikoku)” to its subsequent transnational projects. In postwar Japan, heteronormative marriage has long served as a unit of reproduction in ideology and practice, which explains the extremely low percentage of children born out of wedlock. Keywords: antonio; family; father; filipino; fugitive; gina; japanese; jocelyn; kinship; koseki; man; marriage; migrants; migration; new; philippines; queer; san; state; suzuki; visa; way; years

• The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Millar, Kathleen M. (2014) - Like other catadores, Rose had insisted many times that she would leave the garbage if she could: “The dump is pure suffering.” During the first decade of the dump’s existence, the few hundred catadores who collected there were mostly migrants from the rural Northeast who came to Jardim Gramacho from other dumps that had closed—“following the garbage,” as they recounted. Keywords: autonomy; brazil; catadores; dump; employment; experience; garbage; gramacho; job; labor; life; new; press; rio; rose; social; time; university; work; worker
• Some Carry On, Some Stay in Bed: (In)convenient Affects and Agency in Neoliberal Nicaragua by Nouvet, Elysée (2014) - What qualifies a mode of living, pushed to the limits in a context of social suffering, as “critical” of the status quo or as fodder for political transformation? My work is influenced by the scholarship on social suffering in anthropology, with its focus on the unequal geography, and social and political work, of distress in particular contexts. Keywords: affects; barrio; body; context; day; food; juana; life; mita; new; nicaragua; power; press; residents; social; suffering; university; violence; work
• Editors’ Note on “Neoliberal Futures” by Allison, Anne; Piot, Charles (2014) - The line between job and life—or in Hoffman’s case, death—is porous, much as it is for the Japanese cell-phone novelists described by Gabriella Lukacs (28:1), writers who draw on lives of suffering and pain to produce novels that, posted on cell-phones, entertain fast-paced commuter-consumers in urban Japan. While the materiality of everyday life is both fractured and in continual flux, people dream nonetheless; not so much of making fortunes as of having a modicum of security for or with family. Keywords: future; labor; life; neoliberalism; work
• The Work of Waiting: Love and Money in Korean Chinese Transnational Migration by Kwon, June Hee (2015) - REMITTANCE AS TRANSFORMATIVE POWER Even as most Korean Chinese remained undocumented in Korea and thus were prohibited from moving freely between China and Korea, Korean Chinese families expected remittances to continue to flow to Yanbian, even if there was always the risk that they might be interrupted or cease altogether (as in Ms. Li’s experience). Despite wide variations, Korean Chinese international marriages illustrated a strong tendency, especially at the early stage of Korean Chinese migration from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s: marriages usually occur between lower-class Korean men (rural farmers and urban low–working class) who cannot find Korean brides, and Korean Chinese women who seek a way to enter and work in Korea. Keywords: china; chinese; korean; life; love; migration; money; new; remittances; time; university; waiting; wife; work; yanbian
• Life Above Earth: An Introduction by Howe, Cymene (2015) - Sometimes these are questions of phenomenological dwelling, being in weather-worlds (Ingold 2007), or being attuned to atmospheric movements not as inert context but as a force field affectively shaping human life (Stewart 2011, 452). The detritus of our carbonized practices bind sky and earth life together, opening us up to a redrafting of the future. Keywords: air; earth; human; life; press; sky; university
• The Charge against Electricity by Anusas, Mike; Ingold, Tim (2015) - In this practice of life electricity has been active throughout the eons of organic evolution. Electricity lines often run high overhead across unpopulated areas so as to be as far as possible from the sphere of everyday perception. Keywords: charge; conduction; defense; design; electricity; insulation; life; lines; materials; power; prosecution; world
• You-Will-Kill-Me-Beans: Taste and the Politics of Necessity in Humanitarian Aid by Trapp, Micah M. (2016) - A TASTE FOR SUFFERING Taste occupies a contentious place in humanitarian food aid. Corn, or banku, more specifically, as an emblematic refugee food demonstrates the ways in which refugees did not inherently acquire a taste for necessity, but relied on taste as a means of collectively navigating and responding to humanitarian food aid. Keywords: aid; beans; buduburam; camp; cooking; corn; food; food aid; gloria; humanitarianism; liberians; life; necessity; new; politics; reason; refugee; refugee food; rice; taste
• Last Chance Incorporated by Pine, Jason (2016) - “A life,” for Deleuze (2011b, 29), “is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events of singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.” The repetitions count object time toward a vanishing point, the dwelling place of an unfathomable magnanimous source.21 Sam Walton, the late founder of the company, was driven more by competition than by money. Keywords: benjamin; capitalism; deleuze; human; life; man; matter; meth; missouri; new; objects; press; production; products; things; time; town; university; walmart; work; world; york
• Scenes of Commitment by Venkat, Bharat Jayram (2017) - Yet, as I will discuss below, this submersion of therapeutic commitment into everyday life paradoxically generated the conditions under which the priority of therapy could itself be suspended as other commitments came to the fore. However, it is important to note that Dumont generally thought about hierarchy in terms of the relationship between caste groups, and social strata more generally, whereas I am retooling his concept to think about the relationship between ethical commitments. Keywords: clinic; commitment; daughter; ethics; hiv; life; mother; new; patients; prabhakar; press; reasoning; sendhil; tamil; therapy; treatment; university; vasudevan; vijay
• Inhabiting Media: An Anthropology of Life in Digital Speed by Duclos, Vincent (2017) - Building on Nazaryan’s dramatization of connected existence, this essay approaches digital speed not only in terms of mediality—speed as circulation and transmission—but also of habitability: speed as shock and habituation. My aim is to conceptually and practically explore the articulation of digital speed and of specific life forms. Keywords: life; mcluhan; media; nazaryan; new; press; speed; time
• Tangles of Care: Killing Goats to Save Tortoises on the Galápagos Islands by Bocci, Paolo (2017) - As a sustained and sophisticated intervention into an animal species, goat eradication on the Galápagos was unprecedented in magnitude, but not in typology of conservation care. Unlike the biblical figure, Judas goats were not aware of the scheme in which they were protagonists, but the result was the same. Keywords: animals; campaign; care; conservation; eradication; galápagos; goats; human; hunters; hunting; isabela; islands; judas; killing; life; multispecies; nature; new; park; population; practices; press; species; tortoises; university
• Remains of the Future: Rethinking the Space and Time of Ruination through the Volta Resettlement Project, Ghana by Yarrow, Thomas (2017) - Project staff, including town managers, extension workers, and welfare officers were laid off, compensation claims were often left unsettled, and support to complete resettlement houses was largely withdrawn. Resettlement townships were conceptualized as functionally integrated units in which social, ethnic, and economic differences were subsumed under a regional and national logic of development. Keywords: development; future; ghana; house; life; modernity; modernization; new; nkrumah; plan; present; press; project; resettlement; ruination; sense; time; university; volta
• Television is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival by Moll, Yasmin (2018) - Working with him laid down yet another stone on the ambitious road television preachers like Hosny were paving: changing what Islamic media looks and sounds like. In doing so, the New Preachers and their producers straddle distinct standards of moral probity, commercial success, and sensuous pleasure as their programs expand what counts as “Islamic media” and why.1 Keywords: da‘wa; egypt; entertainment; forms; god; hosny; human; iqraa; islamic; life; media; movement; muslim; new; piety; pious; preachers; press; producers; religion; revivalists; salafi; secular; television; theology; tradition; university
• The Axolotl in Global Circuits of Knowledge Production: Producing Multispecies Potentiality by Wanderer, Emily (2018) - Once in the laboratory, it was remade as a model organism, a process that transformed axolotl life cycles, bodies, and genetics. CARE OF THE AMPHIBIAN The flexibility and potentialities of the axolotl become evident only through the labor that scientists devote to axolotls as laboratory animals, work that has both enabled knowledge production and reshaped axolotl life. Keywords: animals; axolotl; biological; biology; care; forms; human; lab; life; mexico; new; newsletter; practices; press; refuge; regeneration; research; scientists; species; university; wild; xochimilco; zambrano
• Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead by Hales, Molly (2019) - Animating Relations Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead MOLLY HALES University of California, San Francisco https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9883-342X Shortly after her mother Patricia’s unexpected death, Erin set out to digitally track her persistent presence by recording each time that Patricia made an appearance in her life.1 The app included space to indicate the date and time, the location, and what Erin was doing when a memory of her mother arose. Keywords: animation; app; characters; database; dead; death; erin; life; media; memory; mom; mother; new; patricia; press; relationship; sightings; university
• Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolizing Waste with the Black Soldier Fly by Zhang, Amy (2020) - In 2013, during the time of my research in Guangzhou, as the city lacked an infrastructure to sustainably process urban organic waste, both the municipal state and citizens (including critics of WTE incinerators as well as waste entrepreneurs) were undertaking initiatives to identify a suitable treatment technology for organics. ABSTRACT This essay traces a scientific pilot project to transform the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) into a biotechnology to treat urban organic waste in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecologically modern approach to waste management in contemporary China. Keywords: animal; bsf; china; cities; cycle; fly; human; industrial; insects; labor; larvae; life; management; metabolic; nature; new; press; processes; production; project; university; value; waste; work
• The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg by Wilhelm-Solomon, Matthew (2020) - Unlawful occupations offer residents spaces in which they can “own” the city. Both spoke to the continued challenge of unlawful urban occupations in post-apartheid South Africa. Keywords: accommodation; africa; building; case; city; court; emergency; eviction; form; housing; inner; johannesburg; life; occupations; police; potentiality; povinelli; residents; south; spaces; station; tea; urban
• Underground Inscriptions by Lancione, Michele (2020) - Although we were just a few years apart in age, we did not have much in common: he was one of the many copii străzi living on the streets,1 I was an Erasmus student; he was pumping a synthetic colorant (Aurolac) from a plastic bag, while I did not even smoke; he had a past marked by a history of violence and institutionalization, while I was a working-class kid who had never experienced such life conditions. Some moments of suspension: in between life, aboveground and below; in between homing and uninhabitability. Keywords: andra; bucharest; care; city; home; life; politics; radu; underground
• On Waiting Willfully in Urban Uganda: Toward an Anthropology of Pace by Eisenstein, Anna (2021) - For instance, Mende women in rural Gambia utilize contraceptives to time their pregnancies in such a way as to maximize the number of divinely allotted children they will bring forth successfully (Bledsoe 2002); Catholic nuns in Uganda organize their orphanage budgets in light of their faith in divine providence (Scherz 2013); and young women in urban Morocco beautify themselves so as to precipitate the kind of conjugal future they hope God has destined for them (Elliot 2016). International development projects of population control in Uganda have specifically targeted how women spend their time as a site of intervention, seeking to train young women away from “idling” (understood to lead to sex and pregnancy, early and often) and instead convert them into productive economic subjects (Moore 2018). Keywords: abigail; africa; chicago; children; course; family; god; life; marriage; married; mbarara; new; pace; press; relationships; time; uganda; university; university press; urban; waiting; way; women
• Toward an Affective Sense of Life: Artificial Intelligence, Animacy, and Amusement at a Robot Pet Memorial Service in Japan by White, Daniel; Katsuno, Hirofumi (2021) - We suggest this sense of life can be observed as an emic principle of robot design and applied as an etic description of how robot users sense robot animacy through a mode of relating that privileges feeling. Accordingly, while robot users may not always see new forms of artificial life as eliciting or deserving love, affection, or memorialization, we ultimately propose that understanding how artificial agents are designed to seek out intimacy through technosocial means requires in part the operationalization of affect to probe how the pleasures of amusement interlock emerging markets in entertainment robots with new research agendas in artificial intelligence. Keywords: affect; affective; aibo; amusement; animacy; engineers; entertainment; feeling; human; japan; japanese; kuyō; life; new; objects; robot; sense; sony; technology; things; university; users; way
• Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds by Schuster, Caroline E. (2021) - The purpose of this article is to develop an account of how Paraguayan practices of weed management engage financial forms and to show how weediness (rather than crops) marks out the grounds through which weather insurance becomes imbued with value. What intrigues me about how weediness registers within financial practices such as weather insurance is how it triggers an inversion of expected sources of value and profit. Keywords: agronomists; climate; company; crop; data; derivatives; development; farmers; finance; grounds; index; insurance; insurtech; life; model; nelson; paraguay; parcel; plants; risk; sesame; social; weather; weeds; wilfrido; world; year
• A Wild Boar Chase: Ecology of Harm and Half-Life Politics in Coastal Fukushima by Morimoto, Ryo (2022) - In this process, the wildlife incinerators in costal Fukushima encapsulate the complex interdependence between the government remediation policy, which chases radioactive boars away from the evacuation zone, and locals’ desire for regional recovery, which marks wild boars as “obstacles” to be removed and isolated. A few million bags are still waiting to be transferred to an interim waste-isolation site around the nuclear power plant.12 After Gotanda and Watanabe successfully cremated the four boars, Nakata invited me to check out the back room, where the ashes of radioactive boars are kept isolated. Keywords: boars; contaminants; decontamination; ecology; environment; evacuation; fukushima; government; human; land; life; locals; model; nuclear; postfallout; press; radiation; radioactive; relationality; residents; tengo; things; waste; wildlife
• From Hoping to Expecting: Cochlear Implantation and Habilitation in India by Friedner, Michele Ilana (2022) - In an interview, one audiologist rhetorically asked if implanted children should be compared with other deaf children or to hearing children. However, he knows (he does not hope; he knows) that in the future, other deaf children will accomplish more than he has. Keywords: auditory; avt; children; cochlear; croft; deaf; disability; families; habilitation; hearing; implant; implantation; india; language; life; listening; normal; parents; potentiality; therapists; university
• Ontological Collateral: The Entanglement of “Cancer Pain” and “Chronic Non-Cancer Pain” in Thailand by Stonington, Scott (2022) - [English], of treating “cancer pain,” [English] will force Thailand to accept the West’s category of “chronic pain” Before the mid-2000s, no opioids had been allowed out of hospitals in Thailand, but a new movement had emerged, arguing that those with cancer pain required special, aggressive out-of-hospital pain management. Keywords: cancer; cancer pain; category; chronic; clinic; disease; home; hospital; life; mind; nongyao; opioids; pain; patients; press; suchart; thailand; university
• Life Extempore: Trials of Ruination in the Twilight Zone of Soviet Industry by Khatchadourian, Lori (2022) - In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extempore (in English), from the Latin ex tempore—literally meaning “out of time”—could refer to practices of everyday life; ‘life extempore’ in this obsolete sense meant a life in which decisions were made in the moment, in accordance with the needs of the present, with little preparation.1 I want to dust off this anachronism and tinker with its semantic scope because I think that with a little work, it can condense the distinct temporal dispositions and improvisational practices of the former Soviet proletariat whose livlihoods depend on revaluing the persistent material world of decommissioned Soviet factories. Unlike industrial ruins in the West, decommissioned Soviet factories are not places abandoned by the “systemic operation” of capital’s boom-and-bust cycles (González-Ruibal 2019, 32); rather, they constitute sites of destruction on which capitalism has been parasitically feeding. Keywords: armenia; business; capital; capitalism; chemist; economy; extempore; factories; factory; glass; hayk; khimik; knitting; life; machines; market; material; new; press; ruination; ruins; salvage; soviet; things; time; trials; university; use; value; work
• Bumpy Roads, Dusty Air: Gadbad and the Sensate Ecologies of Driving Work in Contemporary Mumbai by Bedi, Tarini (2023) - [roz-roz ka gadbad] the summer and rain make to the traffic and roads,” sighs Mumbai taxi driver Rashid as we bump to a halt at a busy city junction.1 Rashid is a veteran Mumbai taxi wallah, from a family of hereditary, Muslim taxi drivers and mechanics known as chillia. Moreover, sensate ecologies of driving are not just ecological or cognitive orientations but also social and public categories that are collectively understood and practiced by hereditary Mumbai taxi drivers. Keywords: cars; chillia; city; dhairya; drivers; driving; ecologies; gadbad; karim; labor; life; mumbai; naka; rashid; roads; sensate; social; taxi; water; work
• Home Otherwise: Living Archives and Half-Life Politics in Post-Fallout Coastal Fukushima by Morimoto, Ryo (2021) - [原子力災害; 汚染された家; 生政治と半減期政治; 記号学; アーカイブと縁] RESUMO Enquanto o desastre nuclear de 2011 no Japão forçou os residentes de Fukushima a abandonar suas casas, transformando ecologias familiares em locais de estranhamento, Naoko e [acidente nuclear; casa contaminada; biopolítica e half-life politics; arquivos e pertencimento; Japão] RESUMEN Mientras el desastre nuclear de 2011 en Japón obligó a los residentes de Fukushima a abandonar sus hogares, transformando ecologías familiares en lugares de extrañamiento, Naoko y sus vecinos siguen invirtiendo en objetos y en relaciones espirituales con sus casas ahora envueltas en la lógica de la contaminación. Keywords: altar; fallout; family; home; house; life; naoko; nuclear
• Mobile Livings: On the Bioeconomies of Mobility by Achtnich, Marthe (2022) - Such mobilities prompt us to ask a number of pressing questions: Through what arrangements is mobile life, human and nonhuman, economized? In anthropology and the wider social sciences, engagements with mobility have broadly concerned themselves with social, political, and economic dimensions of mobile life and, simultaneously, with how movement and connections across time and space forge economic, political, and social activity (Cresswell 2010; Glick Schiller 2018; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Salazar and Smart 2011). Keywords: bioeconomy; economic; issue; life; mobility; university; value
• Green Involution: Mediating Plant Times and Lifetimes in a Chinese Rice Genetics Laboratory by Fearnley, Lyle; Sun, Chen (2025) - Indeed, Green Revolution programs that aimed to master rice time through “simplifying logics” struggled to manage an unanticipated “interplay of differential yet coexisting speeds” (Gan 2017a, 77). One strategy for adapting rice time to laboratory time is the use of a second experimental research station on Hainan Island, the tropical island south of Guangdong Province. Keywords: china; growth; involution; lab; laboratory; life; plant; press; research; researchers; rice; rice lab; rice plant; science; scientists; slow; students; tempos; time; university; wet; work; yang
• Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin by Demirci, Ferda (2025) - Therefore, in its coupling with easy credit access, the love- and labor-oriented imagination of the nuclear family ideal creates a practical way of realizing a life trajectory drawn for a moral and self-motivated 419man—something that would quickly empower him by rendering him immune against not only temptations but also the “interventions of others.” This evolving moral ecology has imbued easy credit access with a particular moral power by providing a framework for navigating intergenerational and intimate relationships through bank loans. Keywords: access; ahmet; bank; coal; credit; family; immunity; indebtedness; life; miners; mining; murat; new; self; social; soma; turkey; work; yiğit

• Managing Hate: Political Delinquency and Affective Governance in Germany by Shoshan, Nitzan (2014) - These perspectives populate a contested terrain of explanatory frameworks and interventionist procedures, each with its own intellectual and political genealogy, that are expounded and brought to bear upon young political delinquents in today’s Germany. Below, I consider three modalities through which the management of hate governs and, more specifically, aims to reform young right extremists. Keywords: affective; body; contemporary; delinquent; extremist; film; germany; gino; governance; hate; language; national; new; press; right; social; therapy; tomasky; university; violence; work; york
• Ironies of Laboratory Work during Ghana's Second Age of Optimism by Droney, Damien (2014) - It is recalled as a reaction to Ampofo’s experience of racism and as an announcement of the arrival of modern African science. His most visible legacy was the Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine, a demonstration of the emergence of modern African science. Keywords: african; ampofo; centre; equipment; ghana; laboratories; laboratory; medical; medicine; modern; modernity; press; research; science; time; university; work
• Reason, Risk, and Reward: Models for Libraries and Other Stakeholders in an Evolving Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem by Mangiafico, Paolo; Smith, Kevin L. (2014) - The transition to support digital scholarship, open access, and library publishing is simply the current mode with which libraries are adapting their mission to support teaching, learning, and research to the digital age. With these COPE monies the most vexing question about funding for open access and library publishing comes in to play. Keywords: access; authors; journal; libraries; model; potential; process; publishing; research; services; support; work
• From Anthropologist to Actant (and back to Anthropology): Position, Impasse, and Observation in Sociotechnical Collaboration by Stavrianakis, Anthony (2015) - To diagnose the significance of this particular case of STIR for an anthropology of collaborative practice, I briefly situate the case of STIR within a broader configuration and a comparative instance of social scientist collaboration with scientific expertise: Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon’s (1999) engagement with the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (AFM). The method aimed to inflect laboratory scientists’ reflexivity to augment their capacity to integrate sociotechnical issues into their practice through the redescription of scientific practice and the demonstration of contingency. Keywords: collaboration; engagement; erik; observation; order; position; practice; problem; project; protocol; research; science; scientists; stir; work
• Seeing (from) Digital Peripheries: Technology and Transparency in Kenya’s Silicon Savannah by Poggiali, Lisa (2016) - Rather, digital mapping technologies have been primarily used in citizen-led movements to counter existing versions of state record keeping. Below I briefly discuss how digital technologies came to embody the shared dreams that animated Kenya’s ambitious development plans, while at the same time they also expressed and reproduced class-based hierarchies. Keywords: digital; expertise; information; kenya; mappers; mapping; maps; mmp; muhimu; nairobi; new; poor; press; residents; slum; technologies; technology; time; transparency; university; work; world
• Our Master’s Voice, the Practice of Melancholy, and Minor Sciences by Wolf-Meyer, Matthew (2015) - I have been drawn to their conceptualization of minor sciences and literatures through my work on alternatives to dominant American forms of neuroscience, in no small part because the category of minor science provides a means to think through knowledge production and practice and their relation to power; the concept of minor science provides a means to take seriously the expertise of those who are sometimes cast as nonexperts by those in power. Moreover, I am interested in further perverting the category of minor sciences, much as Deleuze has claimed to do to his philosophical forebears, by putting minor science into dialogue with psychoanalytic attention to mourning and melancholia. Keywords: arturo; deleuze; guattari; lacan; lacanian; mourning; nev; practice; psychoanalysis; sciences; seminar; society; university; work
• ARCTICNOISE and Broadcasting Futures: Geronimo Inutiq Remixes the Igloolik Isuma Archive by Hennessy, Kate; Smith, Trudi Lynn; Hogue, Tarah (2018) - McLuhan’s articulation of the DEW Line as medium for transformations and potential futures has resonance with histories of communication infrastructures and Indigenous media production in the Arctic. Inutiq’s response to Gould’s radio documentary also references a history of Indigenous media production that appropriated the infrastructures of communication technologies originally created to serve colonial, national, and international Cold War political agendas. Keywords: archive; arcticnoise; gallery; geronimo; grunt; igloolik; inutiq; media; north; work
• Untidy Times: Alexis Wright, Extinction, and the Politics of Apprehension by Fisher, Daniel (2018) - Children like Warren are thus not simply avatars of a reproductive futurity (see Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Edelman 2004) but captive to the investment in Aboriginal futures of both Aboriginal and settler agencies. In Carpentaria Wright develops a narrative voice that embraces colloquial Aboriginal English, drawing on the speech poetics of the Northern Territory to tell a story about a fictional conflict between a mining corporation and a small, northern Australian town. Keywords: australia; book; future; narrative; swan; time; work; wright
• Wildfires at the Edges of Science: Horizoning Work amid Runaway Change by Petryna, Adriana (2018) - Such fires occur in a range of inoperability (currently estimated as 2 percent of fires occurring in the United States) for which, according to Jolly, “no matter what you do, you’re not actually going to effect change.” Such fires actually move around based on the areas of highest fuel availability or areas of driest fuels, and do not, therefore, always conform to models of predictable spread. Keywords: armstrong; behavior; change; climate; conditions; fire; firefighters; forest; national; new; path; petrilli; press; science; spread; time; university; way; wildfire; wildland; work
• Air Pressure: Temporal Hierarchies in Nepali Aviation by Harris, Tina (2021) - A representative from the Nepal branch of a large international airline also used the idea of global aviation time to vent his frustration with uncertainty in Nepali politics: At these moments, infrastructural hierarchies and temporal hierarchies overlap through both forms of air pressure’s effects, edging Nepali actors further out of the global discussion of aviation futures, though the idea of global aviation time is harnessed to express nationalistic frustration with the ways these structures are shaped: why shouldn’t Nepali airlines and individuals be prioritized in these circumstances at the expense of other carriers? Keywords: air; aircraft; airlines; airport; aviation; controllers; flights; flying; future; global; industry; infrastructure; international; nepal; new; passengers; pilots; pressure; runway; space; time; traffic; weather; work; world
• Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf by Wright, Andrea (2020) - Today, Indian gold merchants in Dubai characterize the city as a “golden frontier” of India. The gift of gold and gold’s position as a kinship substance demonstrate how kinship and gender are defined, understood, and enacted within Indian migrant families in the Gulf. Keywords: dowry; families; family; gift; gold; gulf; indian; kinship; labor; marriage; migrants; migration; money; new; oil; pandeya; press; sisters; substance; university; university press; women; work; workers; yogesh
• Legal Care and Friction in Family Detention by Routon, Erin (2021) - Family detention legal advocates are infinitely tireless, creative, and, above all, caring individuals engaged in what is objectively heartbreaking work. The metaphor of friction appears, again, particularly suited for understanding the sorts of encounters and relationships borne out of legal care work in this environment. Keywords: advocates; asylum; care; children; clients; detainees; detention; encounters; facilities; facility; family; family detention; immigration; law; new; press; spaces; university; work
• The Fish Is in the Water and the Water Is in the Fish: Symbiosis in a Nuclear Whale Fall by Kalshoven, Petra Tjitske (2022) - This frame emphasizes local agency, conceiving of nuclear communities as well-informed, with the nuclear a recognized part of their cultural identity, pride, and well-being. Taking care of nuclear waste (retrieving contaminated objects and radioactive materials from legacy buildings and making and storing waste packages) has become SL’s core business. Keywords: carcass; chain; community; company; cumbria; decommissioning; dependency; fall; fish; impact; industry; jobs; nda; new; nuclear; risk; sellafield; site; supply; waste; wcssg; west; west cumbria; whale; work
• Quantifying Vulnerability: Humanitarian Datafication and the Neophilia of Integrated Power by Firoz, Malay (2024) - VASyR provided policymakers with a quantitative formula to rank refugee households in terms of vulnerability scores—from “low” to “severe”—which could then be used to project a comprehensive national overview of refugee vulnerability and prioritize the neediest families for targeted assistance, such as cash vouchers and shelter rehabilitation. By telescoping outward from the ethnographic moment of refugee assessment, to the datasets that determine which refugees are assessed, the transfiguration of vulnerability into algorithmic values, the retrenchment of targeted aid on the basis of those values, and the broader ecosystem of interlinked data systems into which vulnerability indexing feeds, this article shows how the datafication of humanitarianism adds successive layers of abstraction that precipitate a growing integration and centralization of humanitarian power. ENCOUNTERS WITH A DATA BUREAUCRAT On a sunny July morning, I met with Mahmoud, a young Syrian aid worker, at his INGO’s field office in Kouaikhat, a small town in Lebanon’s northern governorate of Akkar.1 Mahmoud was tasked with conducting household vulnerability assessments among Syrian refugees and had agreed to take me along. Keywords: aid; assessment; assistance; data; datafication; family; food; household; humanitarian; indexing; information; journal; lebanon; mahmoud; new; organizations; press; questions; refugees; system; technology; unhcr; university; vulnerability; wfp; work; world
• Gambling, Dignity, and the Narcotic of Time in Tokyo’s Day-Laborer District, San’ya by Hammering, Klaus K. Y. (2022) - So too, when dust particles flew in the air, San’ya day laborers either turned their faces or wrapped a towel over their mouths. Yet as gambling races proper, they demonstrated the qualities of precipitation and jeopardy—of missing the mark—that Benjamin discerns in gambling, or that Schüll explicates as the “hook” that initiates the fledgling gambler’s repetition compulsion.16 With horses, this moment did not arrive until the end of the race, when the animals accelerated into a sprint, and at WINS, the final seconds of a race were therefore accompanied by loud shouting and exultation. Keywords: akira; benjamin; construction; day; debt; experience; form; gambler; gambling; group; horses; labor; man; men; money; numbers; press; san’ya; time; work
• Infrastructural Decay: Maintenance Ecologies and Labor in the Çoruh Basin by Kurtiç, Ekin (2023) - The master plan defines villagers as “the main party responsible for the increasingly accelerated soil erosion occurring in many places of the Çoruh River Watershed,” given that, “since old times, forest villagers have destroyed the forests for the purposes of procuring firewood and fodder, overgrazed the pastures, and converted the sloping pastures into cultivated lands” (Pacific Consultants International 2004, 5–1). Criminalizing accounts about forest villagers degrading the environment have remained consistent since Turkey’s early republican period (Özkan 2013). Keywords: construction; control; dams; decay; ecologies; erosion; forest; foresters; human; infrastructure; labor; landscapes; long; maintenance; nature; practices; press; project; rehabilitation; soil; trees; turkey; university; uplands; villagers; work; çoruh
• Uncertainty in Motion: Rumors of a Proxy War in Late Industrial Baltimore by Ahmann, Chloe (2023) - Against facile corporate claims that local speech is only rumor and that rumor is not properly political, neighbors implicated absent corporations in a tense battle over local voice, marshaling rumors as strategic speech in a struggle playing out among subalterns. Rumors of a Proxy War in Late Industrial Baltimore CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 38, Issue 3, pp. Keywords: air; baltimore; group; industrial; knowledge; martha; nick; opponents; place; plant; power; press; project; rumors; south; things; ties; uncertainty; university; waste; work; years
• Grinding the Souls: Politics of Interspecies Pity and the Labor of Care in a South Korean Animal Shelter by Jun, EuyRyung (2024) - The pressure for grace then turns ARA shelters into places that actively reproduce feminized labor of the cheap and the flexible (Weeks 2011). That is, although interspecies pity’s blindness to human difference appropriates it to realize its own promise, everyday entanglements such as the ones occurring in ARA shelters are not entirely overshadowed by that coupling of moralization and exploitation. Keywords: animal; ara; care; dogs; exploitation; human; interspecies; interspecies pity; korea; labor; new; pity; politics; shelter; south; staff; time; university; women; work
• The Substitute and the Excuse: Growing Sustainability, Growing Sugarcane in São Paulo, Brazil by Ulrich, Katie (2023) - Maturation begins to unpack the complexities of sugarcane growth as something distinct from sugarcane industry growth. So sugarcane biological growth, curiously, differs from sugarcane industry growth. Keywords: biomass; brazil; duke; durham; energy; energy cane; excuse; growth; gustavo; industry; joão; material; n.c; new; practices; press; renewables; research; scientists; sugarcane; sustainability; university; university press; work
• The Wrestler and His World: Precarious Workers, Post-Truth Politics, and Inauthentic Activism by Hollin, Gregory (2024) - Worked shoots introduce elements that have historically been off limits for wrestling performance: the existence of other promotions, backstage politics, a recognition of the artifice of pro wrestling. A 2016 piece in the New York Times, for example, asked “is everything wrestling?” (Gordon 2016) and, as of 2020, more than thirty articles had been published examining the relationship between post-truth’s figurehead Donald Trump and pro wrestling (Levi 2020, 15). Keywords: barrett; count; kayfabe; labor; night; outsiders; politics; post; real; shoot; trump; truth; union; work; wrestlers; wrestling; wwe
• The Financial Activist: Shareholding and the Inconvenience of Collective Ownership by Kar, Sohini (2025) - For instance, in the case of Rio Tinto, shareholder action and questions at AGMs in London were in response to mining operations in Australia and Madagascar. Rio Tinto offers a particularly salient case to analyze in terms of shareholder action and activism. Keywords: 2022; action; activism; activists; actors; change; climate; company; corporations; finance; global; governance; investment; investors; press; rio; rio tinto; shareholders; tinto; university; work

• Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime by Shapiro, Nicholas (2015) - My purview then widens to discuss the larger sensorium of corporeal domestic air-quality perception and the instrumental use of sensitized bodies to identify the sources of domestic chemical exposure. Couple recovering from domestic chemical exposure. Keywords: air; bodies; body; chemical; chemical sublime; environmental; exposure; formaldehyde; harriett; health; homes; human; knowledge; levels; linda; nancy; new; press; process; space; sublime; symptoms; time; university; world
• Economy Electric by Özden-Schilling, Canay (2015) - In 1996, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission invented the concept of electricity markets—computational processes, operated by nonprofit transmission operators, by which participants’ bids and offers are computed to generate prices binding for all. While meteorological expertise can now be harvested to improve electricity markets, science helps less with the treatment of other supply and demand factors than do professional experience and common sense. Keywords: demand; economic; electricity; engineering; grid; markets; models; new; researchers; supply; time
• Disappearing Mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana by Vaughn, Sarah E. (2017) - So, too, have the new economies in tourism and luxury real estate that infringe on mangrove forests. In turn, slaves and indentured laborers toiled on plantations, which influenced where engineers preserved mangrove forests or built seawalls (Rodney 1981, 31–33). Keywords: adaptation; change; climate; climate adaptation; consultants; defense; engineers; expertise; experts; forests; gmrp; guyana; mangroves; model; mudbanks; new; participants; planting; press; research; sea; shore; time; university
• Gravity’s Reverb: Listening to Space-Time, or Articulating the Sounds of Gravitational-Wave Detection by Helmreich, Stefan (2016) - SIMULATION When David Kaiser and I listened to Scott Hughes’s simulated gravitational-wave sounds, Hughes (n.d.) pointed back to his website, which provided an analogical warrant for posing gravitational waves as akin to sound waves: The waves that [gravitational waves] generate will have wavelengths of thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers. Although these waves are not acoustic pressure waves (like ordinary sound waves in air)—but are theorized, rather, as squeezes and stretches in the very stuff of space-time—their frequencies, captured by detection instruments, coincidentally map onto the human auditory range (though, by the time they arrive at Earth, at vanishingly low amplitudes, one one-thousandth the diameter of a proton, much diminished from their initial, gargantuan sizes).2 Scientists like Hughes have employed acoustic analogies to anticipate what gravitational waves might sound like to a detector, and have been creating audio simulations of possible discovery events. Keywords: audio; chirp; data; david; detection; hearing; hughes; human; ligo; listening; music; new; noise; press; reverb; science; scientists; signal; sound; space; time; universe; university; waves; york
• Speed Crash Course by Caduff, Carlo (2017) - MY PAGE-TURNER COLLECTION On speed you must read . . . but I must accelerate) Virilio: Speed and Politics Kundera: Slowness Wolin: What Time Is It? Duffy: The Speed Handbook Kerouac: Keywords: course; crash; speed; stop; time
• An Idiotic Catalyst: Accelerating the Slowing Down of Thinking and Action by Farías, Ignacio (2017) - The project team is responsible for giving cities recommendations on cocreation processes and, in particular, the implementation of such processes in the German city of Munich. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHANGING GEARS Coming back to the anthropology of speed, it seems that the crucial issue would be to pay attention to the articulation of different speeds in specific settings of practice. Keywords: city; idiot; processes; slowing; space; speed; time
• Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence by Hecht, Gabrielle (2018) - Oklo thus fit into the full temporal range of Anthropocene claims. Anthropocene scholars note that industrial capitalism has long relied on “cheap nature” Keywords: african; anthropocene; atomic; cea; comuf; france; french; future; gabon; gabonese; human; kuroda; modernity; mounana; new; oklo; power; press; reactors; research; scale; time; university; uranium; waste; years
• Remembering Place: The Temporality of Trauma in Rudraprayag After the 2013 Flash Floods by Mathson, Gideon (2024) - This cut of disaster is produced as a “temporal disjuncture” (Pelling and Norbert 2017), which forms a barricade to passing everyday time and forms a traumatic kernel (Amy 2010), which lasts as durational moment that disjoins itself from the flow of linear time to form a block of memory that perpetually threatens the present with the eruption of its own past-presentness. The historical purpose of the revenue officer during colonial times was the collection of agricultural tax, which has been excluded from the ambit of tax collection in modern India. Keywords: caste; compensation; disaster; environment; floods; future; house; june; kedarnath; land; lists; new; past; period; place; present; press; rawat; sense; singh; time; trauma; ukhimath; university; uttarakhand; valley; village

• Ethnography and Theory of the Signature in Physics by Roy, Arpita (2014) - In his essay “Signature Event Context,” Derrida looks at signatures in the everyday context and ascribes “iterability” as their primary specification. Characteristic patterns of decay formed by particles subsequent to collisions, such as a Higgs boson decaying into two energetic photons, are termed signatures and constitute the chief unit of discovery in particle physics. Keywords: background; form; higgs; human; material; new; particle; photons; physicists; physics; press; science; signal; signature; signs; things; university
• Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming by Dave, Naisargi N. (2014) - In the case of animal activists, it is a skin also inhabited by the animal. By telling stories from the perspective of animal activists who identify with progressive rather than conservative causes (see also Leela Gandhi 2006), and from theoretical perspectives other than that of how power reproduces itself in predictable ways, I hope to show that there are and must be other ways we conceive of human-animal engagements in India, ways that are not predetermined or fully determined by Hindu nationalism. Keywords: activists; animal; death; delhi; erika; eyes; gandhi; human; india; maneka; new; politics; press; rogers; satija; skin; subject; university; witnessing
• The Thing in a Jar: Mushrooms and Ontological Speculations in Post-Yugoslavia by Jasarevic, Larisa (2015) - They nurture and distribute mushroom jars with a reverence for the regional tradition of domaće foods and medicine. Somewhat less reverently, people translated and mixed stories of the medicine’s proper name, calling it Tibetan mushroom, mushroom from the Caucasus, Japanese mushroom, kombucha, tea or kefir mushrooms. Keywords: bodies; bosnia; care; fermentation; food; forms; gift; gljiva; health; home; human; jars; kefir; kombucha; matter; medicine; mushroom; online; post; postsocialist; press; tea; things; tibetan; university; wonder
• Better Weather?: The Cultivation of the Sky by Hulme, Mike (2015) - THE TROUBLE WITH WEATHER To start this brief investigation, we must think some more about weather. With this context established, it is possible to reflect on the range of human projects of atmospheric cultivation. Keywords: atmosphere; climate; cultivation; human; idea; sky; weather
• The Wild Indoors: Room-Spaces of Scientific Inquiry by Kelly, Ann H.; Lezaun, Javier (2017) - Yet what gives this particular place its distinctive identity, and what ultimately allows it to support and sustain an experimental mosquito population, is not so much the qualities of its container—its semiporous perimeter of mosquito netting and the polyethylene roof—but its interior decor, the assortment of devices, built structures, plants, animals, and ready-made objects scattered across the facility in an attempt to help mosquitoes feel “at home” in it. Filing insectary trays with Evian water to mollify a prickly colony, arranging and rearranging the potted plants and clay pots in a semifield station hoping to facilitate mosquito breeding, selecting the most appealing corner of the porch to hang a trap—these minute operations underscore the labor but also the intense optimism that sustain the effort to fix mosquitoes, albeit momentarily, into objects of scientific attention. Keywords: area; attention; clark; entomological; entomologists; environment; facility; human; inquiry; insectary; interior; laboratory; mosquitoes; new; release; research; researchers; room; semifield; space; station; traps; university; world; zetek
• Deep in the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition by Sadjadi, Sahar (2019) - I show how the current clinical enactment of gender identity has relied on processes of (psycho-)medicalization, individualization, thingification, and internalization. I analyze contemporary scientific conceptualizations of the brain as the location of gender identity in relation to Western metaphysical conceptions of the body and the soul, and to modern accounts of the self as interiority and psychic depth. Keywords: american; body; brain; century; children; clinicians; cultural; gender; gender identity; human; individual; nature; new; press; puberty; self; sex; soul; transgender; transgender children; transition; treatment; united; university
• Voices of Sorrow and Joy: Cultivating Relations with the Unseen in Muslim Devotion by Williamson Fa, Stefan (2022) - Co-presences are intimately sensed as beings, treated as a person, fed and paid honors, and they offer advice, perceive, and provide evidence of their existence in ways that resonate with Shiʿi relations with the Ehl-i Beyt. Like human relations, these relationships are cultivated over time through practice, including sharing birthday cake and vocal recitation, which enables, generates, and sustains a sense of closeness and affinity. Keywords: ali; beings; beyt; ehl; family; figures; human; imam; intimacy; islam; love; meclis; mersiye; press; prophet; recitation; relations; religious; shiʿi; sonic; sound; university; voice; world

• The Taste No Chef Can Give: Processing Street Food in Mumbai by Solomon, Harris (2015) - His move toward selling Shiv vada pav was a relatively recent one, even though his family had been longtime supporters of the Shiv Sena. To grow business, Maza focused on “new markets” in Maharashtra’s interior untouched by Shiv vada pav—away from the city streets. Keywords: alok; cart; city; food; india; mahesh; maza; mumbai; new; party; pattern; pav; politics; press; processing; sena; shiv; shiv sena; shiv vada; street; taste; university; vada; vada pav
• What is a Situation?: An Assemblic Ethnography of the Drug War by Zigon, Jarrett (2015) - As the 1980s came to an end, it became increasingly difficult to discern precisely the distinction between drug war and Cold War military operations. But if Situationists saw the first political task as the construction of situations from which political experiment and play could begin (e.g., Debord 2006), then the anti–drug war movement begins by disclosing already existing situations that must be permanently transformed so as to build new worlds in which drug users can dwell. Keywords: 2013; assemblic; bud; drug; drug war; movement; new; police; politics; situation; terrance; users; vancouver; war situation; world
• Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible? by Blaser, Mario (2016) - In short, in the report, Innu concerns were split (and implicitly ranked) according to supposedly commonsense criteria that distinguish reliable environmental information from cultural beliefs. In splitting Innu concerns between acceptable and unacceptable, or between those that could stand alongside science-based knowledge and those that were just “cultural,” we can see the work of reasonable politics. Keywords: atîku; ban; caribou; concerns; cosmopolitics; differences; government; hunters; hunting; innu; issue; labrador; land; latour; matter; politics; project; world
• Jane Doe by Cromer, Risa (2019) - The protective walls the Trump administration attempted to build between Jane Doe and her own uterus, to borrow Elise Andaya’s (2019) insightful metaphor, parallel the symbolic and material walls that Trump strives to build around the United States to ensure that white Christian America comes first. In an accompanying statement on the ruling in Garza v. Hargan (874 F.3d 735 [D.C. Cir. 2017]), though, Kavanaugh had argued that permitting Doe’s abortion would authorize “a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand,” revealing how he will likely side in immigration and abortion cases brought before him on the Supreme Court. Keywords: abortion; administration; america; christian; doe; interest; politics; trump
• Reproductive Politics in the Age of Trump and Brexit by Franklin, Sarah; Ginsburg, Faye (2019) - In her insightful analysis of walls and uteruses, inspired by a woman holding a protest sign that proclaimed “I’m building a wall around my uterus and making the GOP pay,” Elise Andaya (2019) exposes the internal coherence in the rhetoric of (non)belonging, insularity, and danger that underlies Trump effects from reproductive politics to immigration, from state militarization to the strengthening of Stand Your Ground laws. Following the historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, Dána-Ain Davis (2019) analyzes reproductive politics under Trump as yet another iteration of the afterlife of slavery. Keywords: abortion; britain; politics; reproduction; trump; white
• The Civilizations Choir of Antakya: The Politics of Religious Tolerance and Minority Representation at the National Margins of Turkey by Dağtaș, Seçil (2020) - “WHICH SONGS?”: The Choice and Performance of Religious Verses The Civilizations Choir presents music as a bridge between religious communities and as a means to transcend communal boundaries. When asked to comment on them, local residents often assured me of the authenticity of such representations by referring to their neighbors, school friends, and business partners who belonged to different religious communities or (as did the vice-governor) to the physical proximity of Sunni mosques, Alawi tombs, and churches of various denominations. Keywords: alawi; antakya; choir; christian; citizenship; civilizations; civilizations choir; community; cultural; culture; jewish; members; minority; nation; orthodox; ottoman; performance; politics; press; public; representation; singing; songs; tolerance; turkey; turkish; university
• Conjugated Universalism: From Rural Pakistan to “Worker-Peasant Rule” by Raza, Shozab (2023) - Baloch, Allah Baksh n.d. DOI: 10.14506/ca38.3.02 CONJUGATED UNIVERSALISM: From Rural Pakistan to “Worker-Peasant Rule” SHOZAB RAZA University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5747-0837 One afternoon as I sat in my apartment in Jampur, a rural town in Pakistan’s peripheral South Punjab region, I got a call from Allah Baksh Baloch. Keywords: allah; allah baksh; baksh; balochiyat; communist; ikath; kisan; marxism; mazdur; mkp; movement; nationalism; new; pakistan; party; peasant; politics; press; punjab; raj; siraiki; south; universalism; university

• Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time by Dumit, Joseph (2014) - … And just as a way of waking up in the morning, I would ask people to unpack objects, to take a chocolate croissant and lead me through flour and chocolate and butter and sugar and coffee and connect us to world histories that way. Necessary for some of us, but not enough to properly wake up to the connectedness of the world, to our connectedness to world histories. Keywords: connections; deleuze; dimensions; foucault; haraway; histories; implosion; kinds; knowledge; new; process; ways; world
• Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies by Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha (2014) - Multiple heterogeneous cosmologies are incorporated within copresence body logics, and reordered as part of Santería’s sixth sense (Guerts 2003). I argue that blackness cannot be removed from Santería copresences’ formations of body worlds. Keywords: african; bodies; body; copresences; cuba; diaspora; fanon; fermina; form; habitus; lucumí; making; matanzas; new; orisha; practitioners; press; religion; santería; spirits; university; world
• Affect: An Introduction by White, Daniel (2017) - Finally, Kathleen Stewart (2007), with characteristic elegance, has demonstrated how projects of knowing affect are inextricably tied to our motivations for and modes of writing about it. Affect Affect: An Introduction DANIEL WHITE Hosei University http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2866-6587 This Retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. Keywords: affect; collection; emotion; gap; theory; world
• In the World that Affect Proposed by Stewart, Kathleen (2017) - The ethnography of such things has to be both nimble and patient, jumping with the unexpected event but also waiting for something to throw together. Anthropological objects became things that shimmered out of molten states or lay nascent in an atmosphere. Keywords: affect; place; studies; things; thought; world
• Landscapes and Throughscapes in Italian Forest Worlds: Thinking Dramatically about the Anthropocene by Mathews, Andrew S. (2018) - Echoes of conflicts over property and landscape are present in tree form. From these encounters I learn to produce a drawing that summarizes my perception of human–plant and plant–nonhuman interaction as they manifest in tree form. Keywords: anthropocene; change; chestnut; disease; encounters; farmers; forest; form; histories; history; landscape; monti; multiple; new; patterns; peasant; pisani; plant; practices; terraces; throughscapes; trees; world
• After 2008: Market Fundamentalism at the Crossroads by Hart, Keith (2018) - The bulwarks of American global hegemony are rather world market share, all of those weapons and bases, the world currency, and intellectual property (recall that the United States’s leading exports are movies, music, and software). The Italian Risorgimento, too, was backed by the industrialists of Milan and Turin, who wanted a national home market devoid of fragmented jurisdictions and the abolition of Austrian restrictions on their access to world trade. Keywords: american; economy; europe; home; market; percent; power; states; trade; united; west; world

• Homeownership in Israel: The Social Costs of Middle-Class Debt by Weiss, Hadas (2014) - Addressing their predicament, economist Yaakov Sheinin (2011) makes the following assessment: Housing prices have not spiked due to housing shortages, as conventional wisdom would have it, but due to the sheer escalation of housing prices, which recommends real-estate as a good investment.4 People buy homes anticipating their rising value. Seeking further insight into the economic irrationality of housing investments, I observed twenty-some mortgage transactions at two banks (Le’umi and Tfachot) and a private mortgage consultancy (Matan). Keywords: bank; borrowers; capital; class; credit; debt; estate; home; homeownership; housing; interest; investments; israel; market; mortgage; nis; parents; paying; prices; public; purchase; security
• Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity “Epidemic” by Sanabria, Emilia (2015) - Critical scholars are calling attention to the fact that scientific evidence concerning public health interventions constitutes only one voice in a much larger conversation. Public health interventions have essentially targeted the rational mind, providing it with information that in the emergent competing view cannot be operationalized because of the irruption of precognitive drives. Keywords: behavior; complexity; education; evidence; food; france; health; ignorance; individual; industry; information; interventions; knowing; knowledge; nutrition; obesity; policy; problem; public; regulation; research; science; system
• Where the Sidewalk Ends: Automobility and Shame in Tbilisi, Georgia by Sherouse, Perry Maxfield Waldman (2018) - The present-day dismal friction of Tbilisi sidewalks is rooted in an uneasy relationship to twentieth-century state socialism, which incorporated many material and ideological elements from the nineteenth-century European liberal city. The company’s practices provoked public frustration and a new focus on the forms of authority governing street and sidewalk parking. Keywords: activists; cars; city; culture; european; forms; georgia; new; order; parking; pedestrian; press; public; shame; sidewalk; social; soviet; space; stopkham; street; tbilisi; university; urban; york
• National Reconciliation in the Age of New Social Media: The War on Silence in the Tunisian Truth Commission’s Facebook-Mediated Public Hearings by Sheet, Douaa (2023) - In brief, in a departure from studies that explore social media platforms mainly through an opposition between the real and the imagined, and from studies that have focused almost exclusively on dissemination, I argue that one of new social media platforms’ defining and yet less analyzed features is their mode of content circulation. The first change that social media platforms bring to the role of testimonies of violence in cohering an imagined collective is that while in Anderson’s study narratives were only passively consumed, now the audience responds and a back-and-forth ensues—new social media platforms have changed the formerly silent relationship between text and audience. Keywords: audience; brahem; circulation; commission; content; facebook; hearings; information; media; national; new; platforms; public; reconciliation; role; silence; social; tdc; testimonies; testimony; truth

• From Form to Content by Ekbia, Hamid R.; Nardi, Bonnie A. (2018) - Although classic cases of repositioning occurred in the past by serendipity, automated algorithms are now being developed for a systematic search, including “big-data analytics that can now uncover molecular similarities between diseases; computational models that can predict which compounds might take advantage of those similarities; and high-throughput screening systems that can quickly test many drugs against different cell lines” (Nosengo 2016, 315). A new set of issues arises, however, when automated algorithms are applied to human affairs such as romance and dating. Keywords: algorithms; automation; content; data; form; labor; new; process; uber
• Economy of Favors: Tiered Labor Systems on Mexico’s Car Assembly Lines by González Jiménez, Alejandra (2024) - She is one of hundreds of logistics workers who, across three daily shifts, distribute auto parts inside Volkswagen Mexico (VWM), the German transnational car corporation headquartered in Puebla, 106 kilometers south of Mexico City.1 Gloves, however, are a scarce item for logistics workers. Keywords: assembly; autoworkers; car; chain; economy; factory; favors; global; labor; labor system; lines; logistics; logistics workers; lupita; mexico; new; parts; press; production; supply; system; university; workers; workforces; working
• Vital Labors: Transacting Oocytes across Borders in the Post-Soviet Space by Reeves, Madeleine (2022) - Spain, for instance, has become a notable European center for the provision of reproductive services for women and couples from northern and western Europe seeking donor oocytes—the result both of specific histories of liberal regulation of the fertility market (including a de facto commercial market in oocytes and guaranteed anonymity for donors) and specific dynamics of intra-European mobility for leisure and labor (Lafuente Funes 2017). The intensified demand for “Asian” eggs from Chinese commissioning couples has dramatically increased the incentive structure for prospective oocyte donors marked as phenotypically Asian. Keywords: commissioning; couples; donors; fertility; labor; mobility; services; women
• Waste Donations: Shopkeeper–Waste Picker Relations in Istanbul and the Limits of Hospitable Giving by Yildirim, Kevin (2025) - When citizens give recyclable materials to migrant waste pickers for free, they transfer items that workers can sell for cash to support themselves and their dependents. This is because shopkeepers tended to give waste to migrant waste pickers if and when they believed the donation was likely to inspire a particular kind of immaterial return. Keywords: ahmet; authority; bilal; citizens; donations; giving; hospitality; istanbul; labor; materials; migrant; pickers; press; recycling; relations; shopkeepers; turkey; turkish; university; waste; waste donations; waste pickers; workers

• Trump, Race, and Reproduction in the Afterlife of Slavery by Davis, Dána-Ain (2019) - According to the March of Dimes (2017), Black women are 49 percent more likely to give birth prematurely, and their infants twice as likely to die than white women and their infants. From their perspective, the medical system treats Black women as disposable and irrelevant. Keywords: abortion; afterlife; birth; control; reproduction; slavery; united; white; women
• When the Punishment is Pregnancy: Carceral Restriction of Abortion in the United States by Sufrin, Carolyn (2019) - THE JUDICIALIZATION OF PRISON ABORTIONS No data exist on the frequency of abortions among incarcerated women in the United States. Despite prohibitive policies and a statistical amnesia about prison abortions, the judicial record from dozens of lawsuits clearly indicates that incarcerated women retain their constitutional right to abortion (Kasdan 2009). Keywords: abortion; health; pregnancy; prison; reproduction; women
• Citation as Ceremony: #SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation by Shange, Savannah (2022) - There we find #SayHerName, a protest hashtag that resists the invisibilization of violence against Black women amid the swell of activism against spectacular murders of Black boys and men by the state. From vigils to protests to literal Twitter threads, the hashtag stitches together a Black feminist resistance to patriarchal violence that weaves through the Combahee River Collective organizing against murders in Boston in the 1970s and Black women organizing against the Grim Sleeper serial killer in Los Angeles a decade later (Grigsby 2014).2 The ritual listing of these names is a fundamentally citational technology, one that simultaneously calls in our newest ancestors and calls out the structures of violence that stole them from us. Keywords: american; citation; citeblackwomen; policy; practice; press; sayhername; university; violence; women

• Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations by Murphy, Michelle (2017) - As a result, the infrastructure of chemical relations that surround and make us largely resides in the realm of the imperceptible (Murphy 2006). It marks an invitation to find other ways of shining critical light on the infernal entanglements of settler-colonial capitalism as expressed through chemical relations, and at the same time a call to direct creative energy toward decolonial possibilities. Keywords: 2013; alterlife; bodies; chemical; damage; environmental; land; pcbs; relations; research; violence; water
• On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi by Nsabimana, Natacha (2025) - Put simply, I approach the question of political violence and its aftermath through the experience and repetitiveness of exile, instead of political identity. To comprehend political violence, in my view, we need not only look through the prisms of identity and law but also grapple with political spaces in which exclusion is anticipated and repeated and the political 521boundaries of the nation redrawn and contested. Keywords: burundi; burundian; camp; claude; exile; genocide; history; hutu; malkki; muzehe; nation; national; postcolonial; power; press; refugees; rwanda; tutsi; violence

• Desnacionalización, regímenes visuales y resistencia: Gitanos Americanos en Ciudad de México by Lagunas, David (2024) - Depende de las competencias de cada quién, de la personalidad y de la habilidad en la presentación del argumento, en cómo contar una historia y convencer. En Yesenia se muestra al espectador los rasgos prototípicos: la estética oriental, el colorido vestimentario, las artes de la astrología y la adivinación, el gusto por Keywords: aires; américa; argentina; así; buenos; calós; cdmx; como; comunidad; con; construcción; cual; cuando; cultural; cómo; de la; de los; del; desde; ellos; en el; en los; entre; españa; españoles; esta; este; europa; flamenco; gitana; gitanos; grupos; gypsies; han; historia; identidad; lagunas; las; les; los; los calós; los gitanos; más; méxico; nacional; otros; para; parte; payos; país; performance; piasere; por; que; quienes; racismo; roma; romaní; romaníes; ser; siglo; sobre; social; sociales; sociedad; son; sus; también; través; una; y la

• Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel by Samimian-Darash, Limor (2016) - The analysis of Turning Point scenarios adds to more recent studies that track the emergence of forms of securing the future that speak to a nonquantifiable mode of governing, one that responds to the problem of uncertainty rather than risk (O’Malley 2004; Samimian-Darash and Rabinow 2015). However, as several authorities explained to me, Turning Point scenarios are selected and designed to create a plausible event. Keywords: administration; event; exercise; future; governing; incidents; israel; new; participants; point; preparedness; reality; risk; scenario; security; situation; turning; uncertainty; university; war
• Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands by Cons, Jason (2018) - The heterodystopias I explore speak in the name of resilience, but they also speak to a broader set of anxieties about the future by taking the delta as a demonstration site for climate development. Figure 2 gives some sense of the density of new climate projects in the area. Keywords: bangladesh; change; climate; climate change; development; future; global; house; interventions; munshiganj; new; pani; press; projects; region; residents; resilience; security; spaces; university; ways; york
• Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction by Lempert, William (2018) - THE FUTURE OF INDIGENOUS MEDIA Until recently, Indigenous media has been closely associated with film and video. THE FUTURE IN INDIGENOUS MEDIA While some of the most cutting-edge forms of Indigenous media engage the future—as demonstrated in TimeTraveller™—most of the explicitly speculative projects are science-fiction films. Keywords: collection; film; future; history; media; press; university; video
• A Right to the Future: Student Debt and the Politics of Crisis by Zaloom, Caitlin (2018) - They “deleveraged” in all areas but one: student debt. Student debt has become a key point of relation between the government and young adult citizens. Keywords: activists; chile; chilean; debt; education; future; loans; new; right; student; tuition
• “Who you are in these pieces of paper”: Imagining Future Kinship through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States by Mariner, Kathryn A. (2019) - In the absence of more widely (and externally) recognizable biological substance and embodiment, adoption documents become the material that not only transforms kinship but also dictates and marks one’s progress (or lack thereof) along the way to parenthood. While adoption documents certainly serve to link individuals and their histories bureaucratically to the state, the documents I discuss here are significant for their ability to create newly (p)re-kinned subjects heavily invested in potent imagined futures. Keywords: adoption; agency; birth; child; children; documents; family; file; future; kinning; kinship; mother; paperwork; parents; past; present; process; profiles
• Heads in the Stars, Feet on the Ground: Scale and Astronomy Initiatives in Southern Africa by Nieber, Hanna; Chinigò, Davide (2025) - Significantly, to secure land for constructing the core infrastructure, SKA South Africa initiated a program of compulsory land acquisition between 2016 and 2017, resulting in the purchase of more than thirty commercial sheep farms, covering about 130,000 hectares. The thread connecting these three stories is how research on outer space entangles scales of human social life and knowledge-making. Keywords: africa; astronomy; carnarvon; dish; future; ground; karoo; madagascar; project; radio; research; scale; science; ska; south; south africa; space; stars; telescope; vanessa

• What if the Environment is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China by Lamoreaux, Janelle (2016) - In this article, and during my own ethnographic research, I have tried to remain attentive to both the ways in which epigenetic research practices and findings may continue a long line of medical practice and moral discourse that individualizes maternal responsibility for disease, as well as to the possibility that epigenetic research may simultaneously contest that very kind of individualization. Epigenetic research often studies the way in which DNA expression is influenced by extragenetic factors that might have previously been deemed social or environmental, and therefore insignificant to genetic processes. Keywords: china; chinese; detox; disease; environment; epigenetics; gene; generations; health; individual; lab; lin; new; person; press; research; responsibility; science; scientists; studies; understanding; university
• The Immune Home: Domestic Enclaves, Diffuse Protections by Kelly, Ann H.; Lezaun, Javier (2021) - Rural house near Mafinigi, south of Ifakara, January 2020. The relationship between malaria control and the conceptualization of domestic space goes back to the very moment the disease was apprehended as a mosquito-borne infection. Keywords: arnold; chemical; health; home; house; ifakara; malaria; mosquito; ribbons; walls
• Archives at the Margins: Toward a Liberatory Pedagogy in Anthropology by Jenks, Angela (2022) - Our university sits about 40 miles south of the SCL, and the packet’s materials relate directly to the communities where many students grew up and continue to live. As they read Nelson’s (2016) article and examined the SCL materials, many students expressed surprise at the history they saw. Keywords: archival; health; knowledge; materials; pedagogy; scl; students

• “Do they do our thozhil?”: Toxic Industrialization, Uncertainty, and Refusal in North Chennai by Raghavan, Rishabh (2025) - Perhaps one thing only was certain: the fishermen would not accept that their desires to build meaningful lives and livelihoods, and to sustain long-standing histories of calling Ennore home, be written out. Given the various of phases of industrialization Ennore had undergone, chemical contamination simply could not be mapped onto one particular timeline. Keywords: area; boat; catch; chemical; chennai; city; ennore; fishermen; home; industrial; industrialization; pandian; pollution; power; refusal; residents; river; thozhil; uncertainty; velu

• Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic by Hunleth, Jean (2019) - Other children presented drawn accounts of loved ones’ hospitalizations well after they occurred and included themselves in the images. Here, I point out that such regimes of anticipation (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009) are not unidirectional, but that Paul, and other children, were actively using them to encourage the types of behaviors and emotions they wanted to produce in their guardians. Keywords: abby; care; caring; children; clinic; drawing; family; father; george; gift; hospital; house; mother; paul; person; play; research; role; university
• Sympathetic Care by Cubellis, Lauren (2020) - The focus on words reveals that no singular narrative exists by which clinicians, clients, or families can make sense of crisis, and the vulnerability of infusing the role play with trainees’ own experiences is an embodied lesson in rendering clinical assessment less certain. The remaining three—Otto, Marthe, and Anne—take on the roles of family members. Keywords: care; daniel; family; otto; role; trainees; word
• Care and the Nonhuman Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving by MacLeish, Ken (2020) - Veteran treatment courts are explicitly premised on a tight causal linkage between military service, mental illness, and lawbreaking. Court participants are subject to regular drug and alcohol testing, evening curfews, and the threat of incarceration if they violate program rules. Keywords: animal; care; court; driving; military; participants; story; university; veteran; war
• Fright and the Fraying of Community: Medicine, Borders, Saudi Arabia, Yemen by Hauter, Ashwak (2023) - Hearing Omar leads us to understand that attending to ‘afiya requires more than the hospital can afford, even in its reclaiming of the Islamic Golden Age displayed on the entrance posters. The significant exception was a patient, Omar, who suffered from a case of persistent jaundice. Keywords: afiya; arabia; border; care; community; fear; fracture; fright; god; hospital; hospitality; islamic; medicine; nawfal; omar; physicians; press; saudi; self; soul; university; war; yemen

• Refusal and the Gift of Citizenship by McGranahan, Carole (2016) - At the heart of this essay (and of my larger project on refugee citizenship) are Tibetan refusals of others’ expectations of them. This is how a change in citizenship refusal is explained, not as conditional on the political promise or power of any given country’s passport, but as a condition of living one’s life, and as a possibility present only in some places. Keywords: citizenship; gift; government; hope; india; refusal; tibetans

• “Too Much” Sand, Not Water: A Geostory of Himalayan Riverine Sediments as “Problem” by Pandey, Saumya (2024) - Floods, landslides, glacial lake outbursts, dam bursts, and debris flow prompted concerns about what really caused this destruction when clouds violently cracked up over Himalayan rivers. In what follows, I narrate my engagement with engineers who produced fluvial knowledge on Himalayan rivers in Nepal and India in their capacity as current or former government officials or as technical experts on internationally commissioned river projects. Keywords: 2020; 2022; bengal; colonial; dredging; engineering; engineers; extraction; floodplains; geology; himalayas; history; india; knowledge; kosi; mining; mountains; nepal; press; problem; rivers; sand; science; sediments; university; water

• Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices by Eisenlohr, Patrick (2018) - In my examples, the meanings generated by sonic movement and the discursive aspects of recitation align, but there remains a difference in kind. While multiplicity of meaning certainly also pertains to discourse, especially poetic discourse, the latter qualifies the meaning generated in sonic movement as Islamic, and even sectarian, in a much more specific way. Keywords: affect; atmospheres; body; devotional; dimensions; effects; felt; islamic; khwan; mauritian; movement; na‘t; press; prophet; sonic; sound; space; suggestions; university; voice
• “Masking” Makeup: Cosmetics and Constructions of Race in Rio de Janeiro by Novacich, Samuel Elliott (2021) - As I will illustrate in the pages to come, there is disagreement between makeup artists and a tension exists throughout the industry between an aesthetic sensibility that focuses on beautification and another that prizes transformation. Makeup artists and enthusiasts who relish transformative aesthetics, on the other hand, seem to do so based on the belief that appearance is itself foundational to personhood, and that in fact all appearance constitutes a mask. Keywords: aesthetic; artists; beauty; black; body; brazil; clients; color; constructions; makeup; mask; material; new; nose; practices; press; priscila; race; rio; signs; skin; surface; transformation; university; workshop

• Circulating Objects, Changing Scales: Circular Cambodian Worlds and Economies by Jensen, Casper (2023) - In some situations, representatives of different worlds come together to figure out how to change the circulations of the objects and reshape circular worlds. Minimally, it seems that the emergence of circular worlds will depend on emerging coalitions of what Donna Haraway (2004, 77) once called “shifted subjects” committed to significant transformations. Keywords: agency; cambodia; cambridge; change; coconut; economy; green; market; material; new; objects; plastic; practices; press; recycling; relations; scale; things; university; value; waste; worlds; worths

• Wild Goose Chase: The Displacement of Influenza Research in the Fields of Poyang Lake, China by Fearnley, Lyle (2015) - As funding for wild bird studies grew, the FAO hired Newman to coordinate international research on the role of wild birds in avian influenza. Following the movement from laboratory to field, encounters with wild bird breeders forced influenza researchers to study the natural world as an artifact of human practices.4 Making scientific knowledge in the field does not bring society into the laboratory in response to a politics of participation, but rather demands that scientists exit the laboratory and build new methods for understanding the creative practices transforming the natural world. Keywords: birds; breeding; china; field; geese; influenza; knowledge; laboratory; lake; new; newman; nih; poultry; poyang; press; production; research; science; university; viruses; wild; wildness
• The Future of Price: Communicative Infrastructures and the Financialization of Indian Tea by Besky, Sarah (2015) - In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, tea brokers in Kolkata experienced a renewed effort by the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. Company profiles of tea brokers tend to include brokers’ interests in cricket, football, and badminton, as well as theater and travel. Keywords: auction; board; brokers; buyer; india; infrastructure; knowledge; kolkata; lots; market; new; numbers; outcry; press; price; system; taste; tea; tea board; trade; trading; university

• Sense out of Sense: Notes on the Affect/Ethics Impasse by Mazzarella, William (2017) - One useful way to begin grappling with these genealogies is to revisit that moment in the mid-eighteenth century when moral philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith were trying to make sense of the place of affect in a then nascent mass-mediated society.1 The human capacity to be empathetically affected—Hume and Smith called it “sympathy”—appeared to them as a kind of pharmakon of modern citizenship: at once an obstacle to and a condition of possibility for ethics in a society of strangers. Marshall, David 1984 “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments.” Keywords: affect; durham; ethics; hume; press; smith; university; university press; york
• Fires, Fogs, Winds by Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2017) - The company also provides storm damage cleanup and restoration services for various disasters, such as flooding caused by heavy rains, hurricanes and tidal surges, tornados and wind damage, ice and snowstorms, and wild fires. Neighborhoods burn, whether from wild fires or demolition crews. Keywords: chemicals; desire; fire; forms; karrabing; kodak; new; running; water; winds; york

• Mourning, Affect, Sociality: On the Possibilities of Open Grief by Wool, Zoë (2020) - It is a powerful book of life and death that refuses the diagnostic categories of normative grief altogether. In referring to a “weak theory” here I am invoking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) elaboration of Silvan S. Tomkins’s (2008) work on strong versus weak affect theories. Keywords: affect; death; feeling; grief; jason; press; university

• The Right to the Remainder: Gleaning in the Fuel Economies of East Africa’s Northern Corridor by Bize, Amiel (2020) - The circulation of fuel through unregulated channels and at prices lower than those determined by the regulatory body undermined the authority of the set price and the collection of levies subsumed into fuel prices. Further, fuel dealers often “extended” siphoned petrol by diluting it with kerosene, which is taxed at a lower rate and therefore less expensive—the government estimates that 80 percent of kerosene bought in the country is used to adulterate petrol, though this figure remains disputed (Okoth 2018). Keywords: containers; dealers; distribution; drivers; economic; economies; economy; exchange; fuel; gaakwen; gleaning; kenya; leftover; profit; remainder; right; roadside; sense; share; trade; truck; unit; university; use; value

• Opening Access: Publics, Publication, and a Path to Inclusion by Weiss, Brad (2014) - In August 2012, the AAA director of publications, Oona Schmid, proposed that one of the publishing sections be permitted to become open access for the duration of the Wiley-Blackwell contract, which expires in December 2017. Our board formed a task force, including some real experts on publishing and open access, and the group determined that it would be worthwhile to pursue this possibility. Keywords: access; sca
• Editors’ Introduction: Open Access by Piot, Charlie; Allison, Anne (2014) - We would like to thank former Cultural Anthropology editors Kim and Mike Fortun for their tireless efforts in promoting open access. At the same time, we asked authors to assume that many today remain under-informed about open access—not only about its politics but also its defining features—and that this special issue might serve as a primer or go-to issue for the Society of Cultural Anthropology’s membership, and for the American Anthropological Association more broadly, as it considers future publishing options.1 We feel that the authors have delivered on this agenda, and brilliantly so. Keywords: access
• Glossary of Open Access Terms by Anthropology, Cultural (2014) - Open access comes in two degrees: gratis OA, which is free online access, and libre OA, which is free online access plus some additional usage rights. Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): “An online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. Keywords: access; content; data; language; march; publishing; text

• #Indebted: Disciplining the Moral Valence of Mortgage Debt Online by Stout, Noelle (2015) - In her research on Michigan’s foreclosure crisis, for example, Anna Jefferson (2013) found that homeowners produced narratives of walking away from mortgage debt as a moral critique of corporate greed and government ineptitude. Once online, many homeowners began to rethink their obligations to repay mortgage debts as they came to grasp the role of Wall Street investment firms in triggering the crash, a process that online participants often detailed in their posts. Keywords: american; class; crash; credit; debt; default; digital; foreclosure; forums; homeowners; lenders; media; mortgage; new; online; participants; press; publics; sacramento; underwater; university; users

• Amazonian House-ing: A Visual Anthropology Essay by da Costa Oliveira, Thiago; Fausto, Carlos (2021) - Esta etnografía visual pretende recuperar la perspectiva de los desplazados, dando visibilidad a la casa como índice de formas de vida y como terreno abierto a la permanente contestación y amazonización. Em Altamira (Pará, Brasil), a construção da terceira maior hidroelétrica do mundo, a usina de Belo Monte, conduziu ao alagamento de áreas habitacionais e ao deslocamento de seus moradores para novos assentamentos urbanos coletivos. Keywords: altamira; figure; house; monte; pará; photo; urban; visual

• Looking Away by Stevenson, Lisa (2020) - The agents responsible for the administration of the Canadian Arctic hoped that sending photographs of patients in hospital home to family members would lessen the trials of separation—in that sense the photographs are material evidence of the Canadian state’s belated attempt to care for Inuit in hospital. The descriptions of the negatives, contact sheets, and photographs stored in the MacMaster Archives are revealing in how little they say: “Eskimos” 1955 “Eskimos with Dr. Rabinowitz” “Eskimos on Wards” Oct. 1955 Keywords: barthes; berger; kautaq; photograph; seeing; way

• Living the Laughscream: Human Technology and Affective Maneuvers in the Iraq War by Stone, Nomi (2017) - Military cultural trainings, at bottom, seek to prepare the soldier “for the real thing.” In 2011, I began formal fieldwork in what I describe as the extended Iraq warscape, stretching from U.S. military simulations to Iraqi refugee neighborhoods in Amman, and crisscrossing through military institutions of Washington, D.C. Keywords: affect; american; culture; iraq; iraqis; laughter; middle; military; new; players; press; role; simulations; soldiers; technologies; training; u.s; university; war; wartime
• Nostalgic Nationalism: How a Discourse of Sacrificial Reproduction Helped Fuel Brexit Britain by Franklin, Sarah (2019) - Reproducing a tradition of local dance troupes that has seen a revival in the twentieth century, Morris dancers are a common sight at village fayres, including groups that continue to use black face paint as part of their attire, in spite of many protests against this practice. These are the same values that inform longstanding institutions of aristocratic land ownership, agricultural stewardship, and the conventions of rural English village life. Keywords: brexit; figure; franklin; photo; sarah; village; war; weather

• EU-Driven Border Control in Niger: From Migrants to Gold, Drugs, and Rare Animals by Lucht, Hans (2022) - From Agadez gold is redirected to Dubai and Delhi via regional markets in Libya, Benin, and Mali (Lucht and Raineri 2019). Instead, local cross-border economies are reshaped by local entrepreneurs who are substituting migrants with less sensitive commodities, such as drugs and rare animals (Lucht and Raineri 2019). Keywords: agadez; border; libya; migrants; migration; mobility; niger

• Incidental Activism: Graffiti and Political Possibility in Athens, Greece by Alexandrakis, Othon (2016) - The process of self-determination Aris, Thomas, and Tassos engaged in fostered among them a sense of belonging to society, albeit as outsiders, rather than a sense of having-in-common with other graffiti writers. The media depicted graffiti writers as ordinary young people. Keywords: aris; athens; crew; crisis; graffiti; greek; group; interlocutors; lives; mainstream; new; normative; press; tassos; thomas; university; writers; writing
• Crisis Effects by Rudnyckyj, Daromir (2018) - Islamic finance experts asserted a technical justification for Islamic finance that emphasized the superiority of economic arrangements premised on partnership and investment, rather than interest-based lending (Mirakhor and Bao 2013). In the wake of the second crisis Islamic finance experts engaged in a project to change the technical devices characteristic of Islamic finance from ones based on debt to ones instead based on investment. Keywords: bank; crisis; debt; experts; finance; financial; islamic; malaysia; press; university

• Radmilla’s Voice: Music Genre, Blood Quantum, and Belonging on the Navajo Nation by Jacobsen-Bia, Kristina (2014) - Radmilla Cody, Miss Navajo Nation, 1997–1998. As one Diné critic has noted, “Although Miss Navajo Nation embodies Navajo cultural values associated with ideal womanhood, we must also acknowledge that beauty pageants are rooted in white middle-class values that present femininity as values of chastity, morality, and virtue” (Denetdale 2006, 20). Keywords: american; band; blood; country; diné; genre; identity; indian; language; miss; music; nation; native; navajo; new; press; quantum; race; radmilla; reservation; singing; sound; university; voice; white
• No Stone Unturned by Byrd, Deanna; Thompson, Ian (2024) - For institutions that do have Choctaw NAGPRA collections, the database records the current stage of the NAGPRA process: inquiry, inventory, review, consultation, Notice of Inventory Completion (NIC), or repatriation-reburial. Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Tribal members are all descended from Trail of Tears survivors. Keywords: choctaw; collections; institutions; nagpra; nation; oklahoma; tribal

• Diversifying Affect by Navaro, Yael (2017) - Many recent engagements with affect theory have therefore inadvertently been repetitive, reiterating by now well-rehearsed analyses about the distinction between affect and the emotions, referring to the particularly nondiscursive qualities of the former and the linguistic embedment of the latter. The serendipitous is coincidental and relies on the generation of unexpected affects of intimacy and attachment between strangers, sui generis, across and against augmenting political divides. Keywords: affect; fieldwork; new; press; university

• Playlists: Cinematic Anthropology by Shankman, Paul; Berlant, Lauren; Robins, Steven; Hirschkind, Charles; Pandian, Anand (2014) - What Faroki Taught (Jill Godmillow, 1968): A remake of Harun Farocki’s black and white, German film Inextinguishable Fire (1969), about Vietnam, napalm, bureaucracy, the centrality of conversation to politics, the question of state violence as counter-revolutionary and what that means for revolutionary imaginaries whose reparativity involves destruction. STEVEN ROBINS (Stellenbosch University) Roger and Me (1989): Michael Moore’s classic agitprop documentary, with a difference. Documentaries about the wrenching dilemmas facing people on tiny islands in the Pacific that are threatened by climate change and related problems. Keywords: documentary; earth; film; john; moore; summer; university
• Digital Sutures: Experimental Stop-Motion Animation as Future Horizon of Indigenous Cinema by Dowell, Kristin L. (2018) - Indigo utilizes the strengths of stop-motion animation, combined with hand-drawn illustration and digital animation techniques, to create an Indigenous world that reflects a vivid rendering of the space of oral tradition, all the while anchoring the power of Indigenous futures within Indigenous knowledge and teachings. This affirmation of identity, connection to ancestors, and the recentering of Indigenous history offers a vibrant example of what Faye Ginsburg (2002) calls “screen memories.” Keywords: amanda; ancestors; faces; film; grandmother; indigo; moon; strong

• Liberating Sick Birds: Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Biopolitics of Avian Influenza by Keck, Frédéric (2015) - Since it is impossible to prevent wild birds from flying, killing live chickens presents a way to stop the disease at the densest site of interaction between humans and birds. In the biosociality of sentinel birds, a paradoxically equipped freedom produces signals on threats that range from trans-individual contagion to species extinction, and in practices that simultaneously connect and distance humans and birds. Keywords: animals; birds; cows; disease; humans; influenza; live; lévi; species; strauss
• The Bioeconomics of Domesticating Zoonoses by Green, Sarah (2022) - Only with the intensive development of animal trade and industrialized farming practices did the scorched-earth approach, one that involves killing every single animal within a given territory, appear acceptable. In the case of nonhuman animal bioeconomic mobilities, a sense of human insecurity arises from a growing awareness of microbes, the living entities that accompany animals and people as they move. Keywords: animals; disease; living; new; nonhuman; press; trade; zoonoses

• Nested (In)Securities: Commodity and Currency Circuits in an Iran under Sanctions by Yıldız, Emrah (2020) - Sanctions have thus in effect formed a regional and trans-border “sphere of exchange” with attendant special-purpose moneys (Bohannan 1959)—commodities with intrinsic value that can serve as media of exchange in a specific context. SANCTIONS, CURRENCIES, AND COMMODITIES In international relations scholarship on global governance, the employment of sanctions—defined as unilateral or collective action taken against a state considered in violation of international law—has been celebrated as a diplomatic technology designed to compel the targeted country to conform to global norms (Cortright and Lopez 2000). ABSTRACT This essay uses a conversation with an Iranian interlocutor to explore the political economy of Iranian sanctions and the creative improvisations they produce on dynamic economic grounds—characterized by an increasingly soft and devaluing national currency, the Iranian rial. Keywords: european; iran; iranians; mohsen; rial; sanctions

• Viral Speed: Infrastructure, Connectivity, Ontogeny; or, Notes on the Molecular Epidemiology of Epidemics by Nguyen, Vinh-Kim (2017) - Controversy over using molecular phylogenetic analyses to infer epidemic origins is best exemplified in the debates around the origins of HIV, which began when a British journalist, Edward Hooper, argued that contaminated batches of oral polio vaccine inadvertently spread the virus in the 1950s: a hypothesis that has since been largely discredited by molecular epidemiologists who instead point to rapid urbanization, railways, and sex-ratio imbalances that shifted sexual networks (e.g., Faria et al. 2014). Most epidemics are believed to originate when a microorganism crosses the species barrier, leaving an animal host reservoir (such as the chimpanzee for HIV’s simian ancestor, or bats for Ebola virus) to infect humans. Keywords: ebola; epidemic; partners; speed; transmission

• Amendment to “Golden Snail Opera” by Anthropology, Cultural (2017) - Amendment to “Golden Snail Opera” Amendment to “Golden Snail Opera” Tsai, Yen-Ling, Isabelle Carbonell, Joelle Chevrier, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The authors wish to make the following amendment to the published article: On p. 540, under Scene One in the Notes section, the following sentence has been added to the note that begins the ontic status of their practical interactions: “Our project draws, in particular, on Elaine Gan’s (2016) pioneering work on wet rice agriculture, multispecies life, and temporality.” Keywords: snail

Epilogue

For more detail, about this study carrel, see the computed home page. For more detail about study carrels in general, see the read me file.

Created: 2025-12-24