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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]

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]

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]