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The Looking Machine: MacDougall, David: The Looking Machine: Essays on Cinema, Anthropology and Documentary Filmmaking. Writing of the practice of documentary filmmaking in relation to anthropology, MacDougall nicely turns on its head a knee-jerk reaction to images as extraction and exploitation when he says, Undoubtedly the filming process... includes a sense of acquisition, of capturing some piece of reality, yet this is just as often tempered and exceeded by a feeling of humility at what the filmmaker has been able to film. MacDougall writes of the work of documentarians and fiction filmmakers challenging the dominance of the Griersonian conception, wanting to represent "ordinary folk"; men like Humphrey Jennings, with his wartime work in England; John Huston, in his [19] film I , Let There Be Light i (banned by the War Department of the United States "for showing too explicitly the traumatic effects of warfare on ordinary soldiers"); Georges Rouquier, who made short films dealing with French artisans at work, as well as features on rural lives and land that are full of ecological wisdom without ideologizing; and Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini, with their post-war films in Italy that chronicled ordinary lives in a realist style. Both men knew too that in some films the filmmaker directs the subject and in others "the subject directs the filmmaker" (Young, in MacDougall, 171). [Extracted from the article]

Focusing on ethnographic photography representing ethnic minorities on China's southwest frontier during the Republican era (1912–1949), this paper reconsiders the role of photography as a source of evidence. The cross-cultural case in China extends studies of anthropology and photography beyond a European context and complicates our understanding of 'photographic evidence' by probing how such evidence was collected, produced, circulated and perceived in Han Chinese society. While photography played a significant role as an evidential force for anthropological and ethnographic endeavors, photography as 'evidence' was negotiated within the Chinese social, political, and cultural context of ethnicity. In spite of anthropological photography's western origins, it is impossible to fully understand work representing the non-Han subject in Republican China without analyzing its relationship with the visual tradition of the Miao album, a late imperial Chinese genre of ethnographic illustration. Through a critical reading of 'photographic evidence' pertaining to non-Han women's work, marriage and dance, this paper reveals the paradox of anthropological photography as visual evidence and highlights the social constitution of such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architectural anthropology offers a way to critically analyse spaces through the social life that happens around them. It is a qualitative approach that relies on ethnography to connect larger systems and subjective dimensions, self-reflexivity, and the use of visualisations as a key analytical tool. This paper reflects on the possible contribution of architectural anthropology to housing studies. More specifically, it looks at homing processes in social housing, interrogating how non-domestic spaces perform through tenants' inhabitation practices. It tests ways to visualise ethnographic data gathered during immersive fieldwork that involved participant observation and informal interactions in a high-rise estate in Brussels. Three types of visualisations (subjective map, annotated photograph, lived-in axonometry) are presented to articulate the paper's discussion of homing, un-homing and de-homing processes at the level of a district, urban interstices, and beyond social housing. Ultimately, the paper concludes that architectural anthropology may contribute further to housing studies by exploring the relationship between home(making) and urban contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Blackness adumbrates rationality and reaches into phobic realms, what Frantz Fanon called the "paralogical." Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic links the dark fantastic imagination and the Dark Other of speculative fiction to their cultural iterations and augments the paralogicality of anti-Blackness by accounting for the narrative roles of hesitation and belief. This paper argues that it is further necessary to assert the narrative significance of nineteenth century Christian, pre-Adamite and/or Serpent Seed theological anthropologies for the production of what one might call a dark fantastic theological imaginary of human being. The paper argues, further, far from being a bygone heresy, the pre-Adamite mythos lives on in the "thin blue line" anthropology of contemporary policing. The paper therefore looks ultimately for abolitionist possibilities to interrupt this imaginary, which it sees in the theological counternarrative of Black being in Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country and its TV adaptation by Misha Green. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera (L.) Vent.) was one of the most widely distributed crop species in prehistoric Oceania, occurring from continental East Asia to the Polynesian islands. Its broad distribution is largely due to human-mediated dispersal during colonization of the islands of Near and Remote Oceania. We explore the potential for analyses of genetic variation in paper mulberry and the value of such data for the development of a new commensal model species for reconstructing patterns of human mobility in Oceania. We introduce and discuss paper mulberry as another commensal species and outline key features for its contribution to the understanding of human migration and post-colonization interaction. Here, we describe some of the extant B. papyrifera populations in Remote Oceania and Taiwan that were sampled for initial studies. We argue that the unique characteristics of this species and its importance in ancient Pacific island societies may provide the opportunity to collect valuable genetic data with which we can address several key questions in Pacific prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their efforts to dissuade Africans from engaging fruitfully on matters of design, including design anthropology, colonialists dismissed the indigenes as only capable of designing witchcraft and sorcery for which they were sadly famed in colonial anthropology. Arguing that twenty-first century African universities need to include design anthropology in the curriculum, this paper contends that the future of anthropology, and of Africa, lies in design as is evident in discourses and practices on designer babies, designer humanoid sex robots, industrial robots, designer robotic spouses, synthetic biology, Artificial Intelligence, human enhancements, nanofabrication, biohacking, gene and genome editing, reverse engineering and rewiring humans, gene and genome deletion, social designs and so on. Drawing on autoethnography and extensive literature review, the paper argues that design anthropology is increasingly becoming relevant in a world that is rethinking modernist designs which are at the core of the Anthropocene. Put differently, design anthropology enables [African] graduates to engage with contemporary, empirical issues of design in a twenty-first-century world where the discipline can only survive by shifting focus from an obsession with sterile discourses about, inter alia, the past and present of African witchcraft, culture, society and sorcery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews and summarizes six economics papers written as part of a project bringing together economists and anthropologists on conceptions and analyses of wealth. The project paired economists and anthropologists in order to illuminate differences in method, analytic technique, and disciplinary framings between the two fields. Anthropologists comment on the economists' papers from their discipline's point of view. The overall project was intended to increase understanding and to encourage future collaborations and learning between the two fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the sea as a metonym for visualising the Caribbean island experience. This paper argues that islanders' relations with the sea are maintained through a double condition of connection and isolation, alienation and familiarity. This paper's theoretical position is informed by 'transinsularism', an approach that addresses how insular identities are constituted in relation to other island spaces. This paper's argument is contextualised with historical and ethnographic material on the island of Culebra, an offshore municipality of Puerto Rico. The historical material addresses the colonisation of Culebra in the 1880s by interests of the Spanish Crown, the occupation of the island by the US Navy and its liberation. The sea features at the foreground of these processes. This paper concludes that islanders maintain a sense of specific insular regard while self-consciously engaged in multiple network-generating networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural conceptualisation of children's social identity and status through memorialisation, based on the study of children's grave markers and plots in five South Australian cemeteries (from colonisation to the present), with an age range from infant (including stillborn) to 20 years. The idea of childness, the differing conception of being or being labelled a child, was used as a measure to identify the degree of variation in child identity realised by child-only and family grave markers, showing both change and continuity in the representation of children through family choices of form, style, wording, motif, spatial arrangement and grave furniture. Archaeological evidence of childness was observed through representations of smallness, innocence, domesticity, play, temporality and the distinct emotional nature of the parent-child relationship. Notably in the latter period of study, within the context of lower child mortality, revised understandings of child identity and status were observed representing the social re-evaluation of prenatally deceased and stillborn children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead 'out of place', I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual 'separation'. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic 'total war', which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision by the British Colonial Office to prohibit the German-born anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff from entering any empire African colony, including South Africa, created a diplomatic problem as well a nearly derailing a major research project, 'the Changing African', developed by the German linguist Diedrich Westermann, London School of Economics (LSE) anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and JR Oldham, secretary of the London-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (IIALC). This paper examines academic and political freedom, as well as the treatment of émigré scholars – those forced to leave for political and/or racial reasons –, in interwar imperial Britain and its colonies using Kirchhoff as a case study. It scrutinizes the role of government and its instrumentalities on the appointment of researchers, using political affiliation as a key factor; secondly, it investigates how quasi-academic institutions, such as the IIALC and the Australian National Research Council (ANRC) acquiesced to government demands. It also illuminates the transnational aspect of security services and the international reach of academic anthropology. Thirdly, it traces the impact such actions had on research project(s), that is, how research projects were modified considering a perceived or anticipated response by government and its instrumentalities in the colonies and dominions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on original ethnographic research in Australia focussing on the handling, management, and conceptualisation of death and the dead human body in 2020–2021. Analysis produced themes of secrecy and (in)visibility regarding both death and the collection of data. Key findings discussed are the withdrawal of information and off-the-record comments from participants, controlling of public access to information, and the (in)visibility of death and the body in the context of the mortuary, viewings and identifications, and the presentation of the body in virtual spaces. The paper argues that those who work with death and the dead in this particular context have power to shield their work, the body, and their processes from the public. Future research exploring the attitudes held by the general public towards death and the body and whether they align or challenge the death industry is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the links among internationalism, nationalism and racial discourses in post-Habsburg Central Europe. Focusing on Czech advocates of racial anthropology and eugenics, the paper documents that scientists embracing racial discourses did not evade scientific internationalism, either as an ideology or as a practice. Instead, in attempting to renew and expand their networks after the collapse of the empire, they were among its pioneers in interwar Czechoslovakia. This keen yet ambiguous embrace of internationalism that linked them to their counterparts in the Allied powers in the 1920s was reconfigured in the following decade. The 1930s were characterized by a search for alternative transnational models driven by political and epistemic challenges associated with the process of state-building and changing theories of heredity. This search resulted in interactions involving even Europe's colonies and dictatorships and became a significant, though not the only, factor contributing to the radicalization of these scientific communities. Analysing these exchanges as a manifestation of the 'dark side of transnationalism', the paper argues for the utility of this concept for the history of post-Habsburg Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of the emergence of psychology and psychiatry as scientific disciplines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines how psychological knowledge, which was scattered across different fields of knowledge such as philosophy and anthropology, as well as medical subfields such as physiology, pathology and state medicine, was filtered into medical education in three medical faculties of the Habsburg Monarchy: Vienna, Prague and Pest. As education was the primary arena of producing authoritative medical knowledge, the three institutions played a key role in the transfers of knowledge within the Monarchy and in shaping 'official' medical practices acknowledged by the state. These in turn could be used to validate different measures to normalize or optimize its population. Through the lens of education and the underlying tension between the different approaches to psychological knowledge that constituted a type of 'arcane knowledge' in the period, with fluid and often dubious boundaries and questionable applicability, the article points at the epistemological uncertainty and transitory nature of the psychological field. The paper also looks at how it was nevertheless integrated into medical education with varying success by the 1840s as part of the professionalization of psychiatry and with the pronounced aim of training specialists who could cooperate in creating functioning spaces for the mad where they could not only be kept, but also normalized and (re)integrated into society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among the Dimasas (of Assam and Nagaland) in Northeastern India. This Indigenous group has a system of double descent which places them separately from the other ethnic groups in the Indian subcontinent. In double descent, lineages are drawn through both the paternal and maternal lines of descent. The existing literature suggests that studies on double descent have mostly focused on ethnic groups in Africa, while not much research has been done on Dimasas or other Indigenous groups with double descent in the region. The paper attempts to fill the gap in South Asian anthropological literature on kinship discourses by focusing on the Dimasas of Northeast India. Further, by taking gender as an analytical tool, the paper attempts to explore the complex cultural contours of the double descent system, which intricately gets subsumed within the patriarchal setup in Dimasa society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-wildlife interactions can affect human wellbeing and wildlife population persistence. This paper addresses the perceived impacts of wildlife on agropastoral food production in the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania. It is based on sixteen months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with agropastoral Maasai communities (2019–2020; 2022; 2023), 240 semi-structured interviews, and a household survey (n = 1076). People felt that caterpillars, elephants, and zebras had the most significant effects on crop production, while hyenas were responsible for the bulk of livestock depredation by carnivores. These social costs of wildlife merit further attention from conservation policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human beings can be found everywhere (Piette) and the true subject of anthropology is anyone (Rapport). What do we need to do to our epistemology and practice to reframe anthropology in existential and cosmopolitan terms? This paper explores processes of cosmology- and society-making through an existential and cosmopolitan epistemology and axiology. We can reenlist classic anthropological discussions on magic to understand how subjects generate a Society into which they insert themselves as creative agents. Magical practice shows how Society is uniquely biographical and personal, and that subjectivity is an irreducible and 'in-additive' source of social and cosmological structure. Cosmopolitan anthropology describes, then, encounters of 'non-interchangeable' (Kneubuhler) biographical selves meeting in and constructing world-space; different selves on diverse cosmopolitanizing trajectories engage in divergent biographical worldmaking practices. In this light, cosmopolitan anthropology takes the form of analytic biography, tracing and retracing these unfoldings of self-orienting structure. Two radically distinct examples of subject-oriented cosmology-making are enlisted: Rastafari I-Yaric and Arrernte tjurunga knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork in a public residential facility for eating disorders in central Italy, the paper examines the relational temporalities of therapeutics by looking at how time affects treatment at the intersection of professional and family care practices. In arguing that 'chronic cases' put into question the specific kind of kinship care that is at the basis of treatment, the paper contributes to the anthropological literature on eating disorders by bringing time under the analytical lens, and to the literature on 'chronicity' by complicating simplified assumptions about structural care problems. In addition, the paper draws on and goes beyond anthropological works that have highlighted the potentially harmful side of kinship - including those that have explored how kinship can be framed as a source of mental distress and at the same time as a therapeutic tool. Kinship as a therapeutic tool here becomes risky because professionals need to borrow from kinship practices in their own work with patients, balancing those with the necessary clinical detachment. The paper shows that the time chronic patients need in residential treatment generates a particularly complex mix between what is seen as 'functional' and what is seen as 'dysfunctional' in kinship care, because the 'efficacy' of the kinship work that is at the basis of treatment rests on that being partial and temporary. Long term care in the facility complicates what otherwise allows clinical detachment: the treatment team ends up literally substituting the patient's family, with professional and family care mixing 'too much' with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1936, Prof A. P. Elkin attended a seminar in Hawaii lasting several weeks, on the topic of 'native education'. In his various papers presented to a range of experts from the region and beyond during the formal conference held in Honolulu as part of the residency, Elkin set out his views on the future of the Indigenous people of Australia. Education would be pivotal to this new approach on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. Elkin concurred with the findings of the residency: local forms of adapted education were considered appropriate for most Aboriginal Australians, only a minority continuing into further education; communities as well as children should be better prepared for their integration into the nation as the Indigenous people. This paper sets out to interrogate the proximity of anthropology and education in these claims, and the elision of Aboriginal people's agency including their contemporaneous campaigns for equal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which rural Vietnamese girls' and boys' moral 'socialization' is influenced by Vietnamese educational discourses, local ideas of the body, and embodiment. In Vietnam, children's learning of 'good morality' is related to the metaphor of 'children are like white pieces of paper', which indicates that children need moral inscription in order to be socialized appropriately. In spite of official rhetoric, which stresses that all children should be 'socialized' similarly, local ways of construing the blank slate metaphor mean that rural girls and boys are socialized in radically different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue brings together five original research papers on chronic conditions in South Asian contexts with a view to rethink dominant discourses of risk, evidence and control surrounding the category of chronic conditions. Focusing on the multiple and contradictory (re)definitions of what counts as illness, specifically in the context of the rising burden of chronic illness, the papers in this issue deal with a range of health care practices from individual patients negotiating with 'healthy diet', to policy questions about the etiology of emerging disease burden and appropriateness of pharmaceutical interventions in 'traditional' sites of healing. While some of the chronic illnesses addressed in this special issue have received considerable attention from anthropologists (e.g. mental illness, diabetes), others, like leucorrhea have rarely been studied by anthropologists, despite the growing literature on 'chronic illnesses'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of online commerce has modified retail and wholesale trade. This paper discusses the consequences for the large outdoor marketplaces that emerged in post-Soviet space. These markets, locally designated as bazaars, have become an important feature of economic life, attracting transnational, foreign traders and offering a huge range of commodities. Rather than attempting to define the bazaar as an economic category fixed in time and space, the article draws on anthropological and historical approaches and shifts attention to the idea of bazarnost' ('bazaar-ness', that is, the kind of behaviours and practices seen locally to have a 'bazaar-like' quality). Using the case-study of a large container market in Odessa, Ukraine, it is argued that gentrification, changing attitudes to various 'outsiders', and the widespread shift to the online commerce have not (yet) annihilated the bazaar as a physical marketplace; rather, while becoming more abrasive, bazarnost' has adapted to, and found its own niche among, regional unfolding economic and political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Austria in wider discussions around the repercussions of colonial violence on a global scale. It focusses on the ways in which anthropological disciplines fashioned specific ideas of racial and ethnographic belonging both within and outside the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Understanding how Austrian knowledge production relied on and participated in colonial expropriation sheds light on the significance of the post-colonial for a nation that did not establish formal colonial rule overseas. The unearthing of the mortal remains of people and other forms of colonial exploitation such as geological extraction were deeply intertwined; they were often conducted within the very same expedition. These processes of colonial dispossession continue to be operative today. Anthropological and other 'collections' from colonial contexts that are housed in European institutions speak to the currency of these issues. This paper argues that different conceptions of time – of the relation between past and present – complicate ongoing negotiations of the meaning of Austria's colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science literature contains a thread of theory on the experience and function of fear within society. However, despite rising global concerns about antisemitism, Jewish experiences of such fear within a multicultural framework, such as that in Australia, remains largely unexamined on a qualitative basis. Jewish individuals and organizations speak in specific ways about their fears of antisemitism, both inwardly to their communities and outwardly to the public. While experiences and attitudes differ between different countries, this discourse can be interpreted as a performative act which produces, regulates and constrains the identities of Jewish communities, perpetrators and societies in relation to antisemitism. Culture is a factor telling individuals what to fear and how to respond, and fears reflect not only people's firsthand experiences but the collective social norms, values, and moral codes their group wishes to promote. This paper examines Jewish attitudes to antisemitism through the lens of anthropological theories of fear. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Jewish community of South East Queensland, Australia, it explores how contemporary antisemitism fears and threats to safety are commonly spoken about within the community and to outsiders, particularly with regards to popular antisemitic stereotyping, "alt-right" activity and radical Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it is acknowledged that Nietzsche read Ludwig Feuerbach, little attention has been given to the significance of Feuerbach’s anthropological re-imagination of religion for the trajectory of Nietzsche’s own vision for liberated humanity, the Übermensch. For Feuerbach, the Christian religion represents a form of wish-fulfillment and subconscious worship of the human being as divine, where many of the presuppositions of orthodox Christianity (monotheism, human fallenness, other-worldliness, etc.) only impede human flourishing. The acknowledgement of the psychological damage wrought by the scheme and implications of Christian metaphysics is, for Feuerbach and Nietzsche alike, a necessary step in liberating humans from their own self-imposed shackles and enabling the human spirit to actualize its latent potentialities. This paper aims to identify Feuerbachian themes that Nietzsche appropriates for his own purposes in Thus Spake Zarathustra, attending to Nietzsche’s early reading of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) during a key period of his intellectual development (1861–1863), and arguing that Feuerbach’s impact on Nietzsche is far more subtle and profound than commonly recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the consequences of the necropolitical border regime on border crossers' lives on the Greek island of Lesvos. It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) that border crossers experience inside and beyond the refugee camps and detention centres, arguing that this inhuman and degrading treatment inflicts, normalises and naturalises disposability, humiliation, and social death. The paper combines a social harm approach, critical migration and border studies, and insights from anthropology to analyse border crossers' lived experiences of violence. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of abandonment and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance. It also expands on social harm typologies by introducing a new conceptual category of harm which I term 'necroharms'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent Kant scholarship has argued that sympathetic feeling is necessary for the fulfilment of duty (e.g. Fahmy, Sherman, Guyer, and others). This view rests on an incorrect understanding of Kant and the historical context in which he wrote. In this paper, I compare Kant's conception of sympathy with Hume's and Smith's, arguing that Kant adapts central features of Smithian sympathy. I then examine Kant's lectures on ethics and anthropology, arguing that in them we can distinguish between two types of sympathy: one that is instinctual or pre-reflective, which we might call empirical sympathy, and one that is reflective and properly moral, which we might call rational sympathy. On these grounds I reconstruct an account of Kantian sympathy as a cognitive virtue for which feeling may be useful but not necessary, since its primary purpose is to provide information about the well-being of others, leading to action which honours their worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper continues to develop 'drugs as instruments' framework by reviewing Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical drug studies and anthropology of pharmaceuticals literature that frames drugs as pharmacological technologies. By discussing especially human enhancement drugs (HEDs) this approach is situated in the new materialist turn in critical drug studies. All drugs, medical and nonmedical, are framed as pharmacological technologies and discussed as nonhuman actors. When discussing drugs as technologies the paper will focus generally on their 'social effects' which include extra-pharmacological variables. These extra-pharmacological variables include what the author refers to as politicogenic drug effects, meaning effects that derive from contemporary drug policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was written in Norwegian in 1967 for the symposium, organized by Fredrik Barth, that led to the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969. My paper was never submitted for publication, however, and the present text is a direct translation of the original manuscript. It explores ethnic processes in Uganda before independence, from the point of view of a group under domination, and strategies adopted by the ethnic Konzo minority vis a vis the Toro in the Bwamba area. In accordance with the doctrine of indirect rule, the British administration had given the Toro extensive freedoms to legally and politically control the entire Kingdom of Toro, including the minority Konzo and Amba groups. Early attempts among Konzo of assimilation into Toro society in order to access economic and political resources failed, largely due to Toro exclusiveness. I argue that this failure led to a further accentuation of ethnic boundaries. These processes precede the later rebellions against Toro rule, which flared up in Ruwenzori after independence. My paper brings attention to the ways in which political subordination shapes ethnic dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have critically examined a range of reforms from education and land to finance and health. Yet the predominant way of looking at reforms has been through a lens focused on neoliberal governance. For example, prior studies of health reforms focus on insurance, financing, and access to care. Yet, seeing reform in this way fails to attend to other types of cultural work at play when calling a policy or law a reform. In this paper, we draw on ethnographic research on health policy reforms in Israel and Bolivia to examine the concept of reform and the work it does within national movements. We argue that while the language of reform often signals change or novelty, reforms also carry forward historical continuities and reifications of the past. By delving into the past and its relationship with ongoing health reforms, we attend to how reforms can reinforce and maintain health inequities in some cases, while creating a national language for new possibilities in others. Reform, as we will discuss in this paper, is not only about political ideology, neoliberal governance, or on-the-ground policy implementation, but centrally it is about representations of aspirations, and about crafting relationships between past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the different perspectives on important issues discussed in archaeological inquiry. Distinction between core beliefs and models; Assumption of the application of model from classical economics to an archaeological problems; Requirement of a recursive relationship between ideas and observations in learning the process of doing archaeology.

This paper explores negotiations of futures within and beyond Germany's formerly fastest shrinking city, the East German city of Hoyerswerda. Originally built for the German Democratic Republic's miners and energy workers, its model socialist New City attracted tens of thousands of people in the latter half of the 20th century. In the wake of German reunification, this direction of mobility reversed. Economic transformations resulted in widespread unemployment and subsequent outmigration. Mostly the young and well-educated left the city, as reunified Germany saw millions of East Germans move 'to the West'. Beyond outmigration, those staying behind continued to face their city's presumed loss of the future. However, widespread expectations of better futures elsewhere did not necessarily result in ever more people leaving. Futures elsewhere were contrasted to futures elsewhen: hopeful local futures different to the one of continuous decline so commonly predicted. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore these entangled practices of place- and future-making and map the different expectations of im/mobility that make up a surprisingly complex local regime of im/mobility. I do so in order to ascertain what keeps peripheral postindustrial cities like Hoyerswerda going amidst accelerated urban decline and ubiquitous outmigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the concept of the heart in the works of Max Scheler and María Zambrano. Both authors use the heart as a metaphor for distinct human affective phenomena that have a central anthropological, epistemological, and ontological significance. The comparison between authors' use of the metaphor is organised around three main topics: the order of the heart; the idea of a primordial feeling and its place in the affective life; and the primacy of love in relation to negative affective attitudes. Our aim is twofold: to investigate the influence of Scheler on Zambrano's thought and to demonstrate how Scheler's phenomenology of affectivity transformed in Spanish philosophy and, in particular, in Zambrano's work. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper focuses on Scheler's model of affectivity (section 2), presents an overview of Scheler's reception in Spain focusing on Zambrano's knowledge of his works (section 3), and examines Zambrano's notion of the heart tracing parallelisms in Scheler's works (section 4). The paper concludes with a discussion on Zambrano's extension and transformation of the metaphor of the heart in the context of Spanish philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang's representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang's works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang's visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of "Mongoloid" or "Yellow" racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of "Mongoloid/Yellow." His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2019, Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was declared a public health emergency of international concern and neighbouring countries were put on high alert. This paper examines the intersections of gender, caregiving, and livelihood practices in Uganda's border districts that emerged as key factors to consider in preparedness and response. This paper is based on an anthropological study of the Ebola context among Bantu cultures. We report on data from focus group discussions and key informant interviews with various sectors of the community. The study identified intersecting themes reported here: (1) women as primary caregivers in this context; and (2) women as providers, often in occupations that increase vulnerability to Ebola. Findings demonstrate the role that women play inside and outside the home as caregivers of the sick and during burials, and intersections with livelihood-seeking strategies. Because women's caregiving is largely unpaid, women face a double burden of work as they seek other livelihood strategies that sometimes increase vulnerability to Ebola. Epidemic response should address these intersections and the context-specific vulnerabilities of caregivers; it should also be localised and community-centred and able to attend to the cultural as well as the economic needs of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When trying to understand childhood obesity, policymakers and healthcare professionals most often make use of behavioural sciences and biomedical perspectives. This approach assumes that fatness is unhealthy and caused by people making 'bad choices' about their diet and physical activity. Increasingly not only parents, but also children, are considered to be individually responsible for their weight, their health, and through that, for the 'obesity epidemic'. Drawing on critical obesity/weight studies and practice theory, this paper challenges the individualistic and weight-based view of health, and the heuristic of 'individual food choice', and through that such a framing of childhood obesity. It does so by focusing on the experiences of young people medically identified as overweight, who are trying to lose weight. Looking at two domains of children's lives, their family and peers, the paper demonstrates how young people experience and negotiate the individualized health advice, and what sort of consequences this has for their daily lives, and their mental and physical wellbeing. The article is based on observations of interactions between families and healthcare professionals, conversations with children and parents, as well as participant observation at youth summer weight loss camps, which were part of a larger ethnographic research project conducted in 2018–2019 in Poland. The paper concludes by proposing to reframe how we think about childhood obesity, and consider young people's knowledge and lived experiences when re-designing policy interventions and wellbeing promotion programmes, that is, to work with, and not on, children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global rise of populism and concomitant polarizations across disenfranchised and marginalized groups has been magnified by so-called echo chambers, and a major public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to fuel these intergroup tensions. Media institutions disseminating information on ways to prevent the propagation of the virus have reactivated a specific discursive phenomenon previously observed in many epidemics: the construction of a defiled 'Other'. With anthropological lenses, discourse on defilement is an interesting path to understand the continuous emergence of pseudo-scientific forms of racism. In this paper, the authors focus on 'borderline racism', that is the use of an institutionally 'impartial' discourse to reaffirm the inferiority of another race. The authors employed inductive thematic analysis of 1200 social media comments reacting to articles and videos published by six media in three different countries (France, United States and India). Results delineate four major themes structuring defilement discourses: food (and the relationship to animals), religion, nationalism and gender. Media articles and videos portrayed Western and Eastern countries through contrasting images and elicited a range of reaction in readers and viewers. The discussion reflects on how borderline racism can be an appropriate concept to understand the appearance of hygienic othering of specific subgroups on social media. Theoretical implications and recommendations on a more culturally sensitive approach of media coverage of epidemics and pandemics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings to light the customary court of dareemat and explores its structure and practice among Pashtuns in the Zhob District of Balochistan. Existing literature on Pashtun society has mainly focused on the jirgah as the sole traditional institution of settling conflicts and disputes. The institution/court of dareemat primarily deals with resolution of disputes and conflicts pertaining to claims over property, land, accusations, and allegations. It consists of dareeman (arbitrators), disputants, eyewitnesses, and observers. Dareemat can be initiated through mutual consent of the disputants or arbitrators, depending on the intensity of the conflict or dispute. Individual males, having reputation for integrity, eloquence, expertise, and experience of arbitration (dareemat), are trusted with the task of being jury in the court of dareemat. It exists parallel to statutory courts of civil disputes in Zhob. The post-colonial state of Pakistan somehow has recognized the role of customary laws and courts in the sphere of civil disputes in predominantly Pashtun areas in tribal regions of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. By applying a legal pluralism lens to study the practice and settlement of civil disputes by using the customary dareemat court, Pashtuns in Zhob District prefer to settle their disputes outside formal courts, in the dareemat as a first recourse to justice. The findings of the article are based on 10 months anthropological fieldwork substantiated by dareemat archives in the form of affidavits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to reflect on some ways of learning present in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion, and the relations between making, knowing, and being that compose this system. Based on an ethnographic experience carried out in Salvador, Bahia, the paper aims to explore the notion of path (caminho), as a way of articulating being and making, gift and initiation, to com'pose a partial and situated knowledge. In this sense, it argues that the learning system of Candomblé is a transformative process that involves a hesitantly know-how that is constituted by practical experiences and dealings with unknown forces, in a game of visibilities and invisibilities that, playing with Tim Ingold's work, we could call an 'education of distraction'. Finally, the paper proposes to reverberate this way of learning into anthropological practice itself, thinking of it as a partial, hesitant and transformative process that is constituted in the very experience of the encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding people's concepts of illness and health is key to crafting policies and communications campaigns to address a particular medical concern. This paper gathers cultural knowledge on infectious disease causation, prevention, and treatment the Philippines that are particularly relevant for the COVID-19 pandemic, and analyzes their implications for public health. This paper draws from ethnographic work (e.g. participant observation, interviews, conversations, virtual ethnography) carried out individually by each of the two authors from February to September 2020. The data was analyzed in relation to the anthropological literature on local health knowledge in the Philippines. We find that notions of hawa (contagion) and resistensiya (immunity) inform people's views of illness causation as well as their preventive practices - including the use of face masks and 'vitamins' and other pharmaceuticals, as well as the ways in which they negotiate prescriptions of face mask use and physical distancing. These perceptions and practices go beyond biomedical knowledge and are continuously being shaped by people's everyday experiences and circulations of knowledge in traditional and social media. Our study reveals that people's novel practices reflect recurrent, familiar, and long-held concepts - such as the moral undertones of hawa and experimentation inherent in resistensiya. Policies and communications efforts should acknowledge and anticipate how these notions may serve as either barriers or facilitators to participatory care and improved health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I am interested in how a novel can make us see children as active and direct witnesses of their time. Through a close reading of The Sound and the Fury, I ask what we (adults and scholars) can learn from children. By closely looking at the picture of the ordinary through the lens of Faulkner's children recounting household events, I hope to show that they can inspire us to look differently at the world and teach us something about human attention and responsiveness to the life of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects upon some modern theologians' stance on the idea of "Deep Incarnation" offering its Eastern Orthodox theological, philosophical and scientific assessment. The main problems and corresponding questions to this idea are: (1) Because of the vast and causally disconnected structure of the universe, humanity at best is consubstantial to the 4% of matter in the visible universe so that the claims for the relevance of the historical Incarnation to the whole creation are not plausible; (2) By de facto equating the transfigured flesh of Christ (through the hypostatic union), with the rest of creation, thus depriving the process of deification of humanity and transfiguration of the visible universe of its temporal dimension, Deep Incarnation goes contrary to the Orthodox stance on deification as a personal endeavour not implanted into the logic of the natural world; (3) the claims of the Deep Incarnation idea would be trivial if they were concerned only with the necessary conditions for the historical Incarnation, which are cosmological. However, the sufficient conditions of the Incarnation as an inaugural event of Christian history cannot be placed into the fabric of the material world. (4) The idea of Deep Incarnation may be treated as contributing to the old makroanthropos idea, related to humanity as a mediating agency not only between moral divisions in creation, but also between different life forms by bringing them to the unity in God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the discourses within the academic field of Disability studies and Disability theology concern inclusion, one of the dominant themes employed is the concept of friendship. The theological work of Hans Reinders and John Swinton have been among those most cited works among disability theologians. Their work on the revolving subject will be considered within the scope of this approach. In light of a comparative analysis, my attempt in this paper is to search whether their views on friendship involve ideas crucial for reconsidering friendship's anthropology which, in my view, is crucial torethink friendship with disabled people and which, for such a reason, I will specify as an anthropology of relational interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is an important driver of migration, but little research exists on whether migrant communities in the U.S. identify climate change-related factors as reasons for migrating. In 2021, we conducted a multidisciplinary, collaborative project to better understand the nexus of climate change and immigrant health in the Atlanta area. This paper presents one arm of this collaboration that explored both the role of climate change in decisions to immigrate to Georgia and the ways that climate change intersects with other possible drivers of migration. First generation migrants from Latin America were recruited primarily through CPACS Cosmo Health Center and were invited to participate in an intake survey and an in-depth interview. Results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Findings suggest that while participants may not have explicitly identified climate change as a primary reason for migration, in both surveys and in-depth interviews, participants reported multiple and intersecting social, economic, political, and environmental factors that are directly or indirectly influenced by climate change and that are involved in their decisions to migrate. The narratives that emerged from in-depth interviews further contextualised survey data and elucidated the complex nexus of climate change, migration, and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro's anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging, sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of 'gossip'. However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as investigator and subject understood in different ways the meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they co-produced. Ultimately, Shapiro's ambivalent approach to the status of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with Pitcairn's local hospitable forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against legal scepticism which constructs litigations as negative or useless 'lawfare', this article argues for the need to recognise that taking government to court is part of a wider strategy of social mobilisation and campaigns for social justice, as others have also claimed. Legal mobilisation during a public sector strike in Botswana in 2011 was, the paper argues, only one strategic part of a more comprehensive campaign to call on government to pay its workers a living wage. The paper calls for anthropology to re-examine some of its assumptions about the role of the law in postcolonial nations. Despite the possibility that judges may be biased or vulnerable to political influence, and despite the courts' restricted ability to implement their judgements - it is nevertheless the case that ethics, morality and the law, when mobilised alongside concerted political and civic activism, may play a critical role in advancing the cause of citizens' rights against an apparently all-powerful government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Afterword explores the complex relations of anthropological thinking about silence and hauntology. It distinguishes among those papers that focus on silence and silencing in relation to historical trauma and those that focus on the place of silence in the rhythms of everyday life. An attention to the concealment and repression of memories of historical violence, which continue to haunt the present, are linked here and in the hauntology/spectrality literature to Derrida's conceptualization of hauntology, but also to Abraham and Torok's [1986. The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press] classic notion of the encryptment of hidden affective complexes, passed along unconsciously from generation to generation. The role of giving voice to such 'phantoms' as therapeutic is discussed and contested throughout this collection, suggesting more complex views of the relations between silence and voice. Over against the focus on silence as concealed trauma, Weller elaborates a notion of silence as essential to the everyday, to music, narrative and ritual, and intimately linked to the silence of loss and longing. This view of silence is brought into conversation with Rahimi's work on [2021. The Hauntology of Everyday Life. New York: Springer International Publishing]. The relation of the aural, of voice and silence, to the visual, the visible and the hidden, is an important theme in this work. The Afterword honours Mary Steedly, who was to be the commentator on the original presentation of these papers. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of her writings on transparency and apparition, on silence as a 'gift' and mourning as a means of resolution of historical trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to use the three terms complexity, connection, and comparison as part of a possible method for the discipline of global intellectual history. Taking the 1993 presidential address by anthropologist Anette Weiner as its starting point, the paper argues that the discipline of history of ideas is facing a challenge similar to that confronted by social anthropology a quarter of a century ago: It needs to reject the constrictions of 'cultural boundaries' and demonstrate 'a commitment to a global comparative perspective' instead. A global intellectual history of this nature would also be consistent with Arthur B. Lovejoy's statement that 'ideas are the most migratory things in the world'. The text proposes a method for global intellectual history based on the three aforementioned terms – exemplified by cases from Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. Scholars within several disciplines are increasingly arguing for the Academy to 'decolonize' and to offer a less ethnocentric narrative. By proposing a methodological draft for a global intellectual history, this paper argues that we can move beyond deconstruction and decolonization and focus instead on 'reconstruction' of a global and comparative perspective as a fruitful way forward for the discipline in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In England the macro context of adoption practice is characterised by radical change across administrative, political and organisational systems. The adoption regionalisation programme is underpinned by a policy commitment to speed up 'matching' processes. The Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 states that adoptions should 'proceed swiftly' and some agencies are pioneering online and virtual introductions between children and prospective adopters. This paper offers a timely contribution to practice debates and scholarship in this area. Drawing on a collaborative doctoral study, 'everyday' practices are considered through an emergent theoretical framework, the 'liminal hotspot'. The analysis hones in on the transformative practices generated in the early matching stages and the role of the social worker in their mediation and management. This paper supports findings from other studies that suggest that when matches are rushed necessary processing of complex dynamics is by-passed, creating unnecessary vulnerabilities in the fabric of new families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the challenges and possibilities of combining archival and ethnographic methods in the field of 'communal' violence studies in India. Drawing insights from debates among historians and anthropologists on the multifarious interactions between archives and ethnography and reflecting on the empirical case of persistent violence between Muslims and Christians in southern India, it argues for a creative synthesis of these two modes of inquiry for an adequate understanding of 'communal' violence and riot inquiry commissions in India. First, the paper critiques how colonial and postcolonial Indian archival reports problematically inscribe violence between any religious communities (such as Muslims and Christians) in the same narrative as the predominant case of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Second, it illuminates how archival ethnography can be an effective way of studying violence between religious communities and thus transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the paper introduces a nuanced approach, called 'ethnography of archiving', to detail the judicial and nonjudicial discourses and bureaucratic manoeuvring involved in the creation of an archival report, thereby unravelling the power relations, mediating processes, manipulations and bureaucratic performances that make commission reports problematic even today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]