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Building upon ethnographic research conducted among participants in UK-based initiatives in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, the paper contributes to anthropological literature on the essentialising nature of state-sponsored constructions of minoritised groups. More specifically, I put forward two sets of arguments. Firstly, I suggest a concept of simultaneity that challenges colonially inflected conceptualisations of the relationship between communities and their respective traditions. Activists of Jewish-Muslim inter-community work subvert dominant conceptualisations of intergroup commonalities and divergencies by developing a theorisation of Jewish-Muslim relations that acknowledges group similarities and differences as overlapping categories. Secondly, I contribute to John Jackson's (2005) theorisation of racial sincerity, a notion offering a conceptual challenge to the notion of authenticity. I argue that the complexity of my interlocutors' thematisations of Jewish-Muslim relations underpinned by the diversity of the sources of knowledge that they rely on could be best understood as an example of this analytic. On a broader theoretical plane, the paper proposes a framework that underscores the agentive power of minority communities and pays close attention to the way they define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and each other in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd in America and a global Black Lives Matter response triggered anew the global struggle for racial justice. Using cyber, remote, and in-person ethnographic methods, this paper explores racial identity, allyship and processes of becoming during the spring and summer of 2020. Building on theories of 'the struggle for recognition', I situate becoming within the interplay of what I call epistemic, affective and reciprocal authenticity. Within this project, I address identity, redistribution and the reconfiguration of conceptual distinctions between justice and dignity. The analysis reflects a time of racial tension in a provincial Northeastern town in England, UK – a predominantly white and marginalised location. I amplify the personal testimonies, conversations and written words of three quite different activists to highlight the nuanced refractions of lived experience and a developing antiracism. These collaborators reveal how their antiracist becomings, in the light of 2020 events, incorporate affective, epistemic and reciprocal authenticities that bring to the fore new potentialities for racial justice, white allyship and recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the debate in archaeological theory throughout the last decades has revolved around challenging problematic humanist principles that have shaped our discipline, particularly the idea that humans are masters over nature. Postprocessualists sought, among other things, to emancipate the human condition from this essentialist claim in part by exposing the historical and cultural situatedness of this humanist principle – an epistemological endeavour. In comparison, posthumanists have animated the material world (albeit in different ways) to decentre human beings in relation to long-forsaken nonhumans – an ontological agenda. While posthumanists accuse postprocessualists of practicing anthropocentrism and the latter accuse the former of occupying an ahumanist and anti-epistemological position, there are powerful commonalities in their critique of late humanist doctrines. The aim of this paper is to introduce a theory that exposes the illusory humanist claim of human control over nature and to recognise other forces with momentum besides human will, while at the same time giving prominence to questions about human knowledge and practice. Therefore, a connection is formed between postprocessualism and posthumanism and, as an ironic result, a theory of breakage is formulated. When we consider human participation with breakage, defined as those continuous and uncontrollable phenomena involving the unbinding of object form, we come to terms with a different form of anthropological understanding termed 'the social knowledge of breakage'. This constitutes an embodied form of knowledge, which is acquired and expressed practically from a young age about how objects break and how one must respond to these situations. This knowledge is exposed in both mundane and ceremonial practices, in linguistic and non-linguistic forms, shaping social practices in uncertain ways, and can be analysed according to three different strands. In this way, we become aware of the creative ways in which broken materials inadvertently affect our practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What smell does border death leave to the inhabitants of borderlands? Is the encounter with the dead bodies of the migrants who perished in the Mediterranean Sea telling in how we articulate discussions around (necro)politics at the external borders of Europe? Based on one-year of fieldwork on the island of Lampedusa (Southern Italy), Door to Europe, and frontier for irregular border crossing, I argue that border death has consequences for both the migrants and the inhabitants of borderlands. The paper will trace such consequences through the testimony of Vincenzo, the old cemetery gatekeeper of Lampedusa, the witness and bearer of knowledge around the nameless bodies buried in Lampedusa's cemetery since 1996. This approach will help considering the extent to which the encounter with migrants' dead bodies – bare life in death – allows ethnographers to speak of the inherently violent system that scholars referred to as necropolitics or thanatopolitics, and the otherwise irreducible force of life, which manifests itself beyond any possible attempt to reduce it or silence it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term imagination and its derivatives often serve as points of departures, yet a concise understanding of imagination in anthropology is lacking. In this paper, we argue for a contextualized anthropological approach to imagination; a complex notion which has been used to describe the human capacity to mentally (re)create that what is not materially present; the creative process of imagining; and the individual and social products of such a process. We address terminological particularities, conceptual differences, and related concepts in addition to discussing the importance of methods and the poetic imagination. In doing so, we consolidate and elaborate on previous analytical and conceptual works to provide a more explicit middle-range theory of imagination from an anthropological perspective. While we propose understanding imagination as a guiding action in situations of uncertainty or ignorance and emphasize focusing on everyday processes and practices, our discussions provide a framework to discuss and compare empirically grounded findings regarding imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of ritual is a major anthropological question. In this paper, I challenge some of the explanations anthropologists have provided to such a question and I attempt to formulate an original theorization of ritual as metaphor. The proposed hypothesis is grounded in two inspiring concepts: Ernesto De Martino's idea of "dehistorification" as the main technique of the ritual and Bruce Kapferer's "virtuality" as its proper dynamic dimension. Drawing on these theoretical foundations and a direct ethnographic experience and conceiving of ritual as a practice rather than as a symbol, I propose to regard it as a particular practice of metaphorization that is not representative of reality but effective on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout life, one may witness grand views, scenes accompanied by intense affect and a sense of awe or wonder. The awe-inspiring things in these experiences vary considerably from suns in sunsets to glowing visages in holy visions to juices in simple tangerines. For different people, different views along the broad spectrum of these affectively intensive grand-view experiences can produce meaning in life, the influential facet of wellbeing identified by positive psychologists but poorly differentiated from meaning-making in other senses. This paper lays out a theory of semiotic vista to organize such disparate signification events and their use of both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Using the examples of accounts of mountain hiking experiences, mindfulness meditation experiences, and supernatural encounters, I describe semiotic vista as a transitional mode of semiotic viewing in which agents re-interpret multiple signifiers of ordinary phenomena (objects) as valorized components of novel contexts, typically in association with intense affective experience. The vista mode is heavily facilitated by the (re)generation of at least two primary types of first-order indexical interpretants which occur in these contexts and of their attendant second-order indexicality which (semi)permanently re-contextualizes the objects originally referenced in the same view. I also briefly touch on how this process relates to storytelling and audience reactions. This analysis has implications for wellbeing, positive affect generation, and ideological enregisterment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of 'corporate sovereignty' and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the relationship between the crises of capitalist growth and democratic politics, this paper discusses the notions of degrowth and conviviality. Both concepts are often interpreted as making similar proposals in response to questions of environmental transformation. However, they bear on different strands of critique. While degrowth criticizes the momentum of capitalist accumulation, conviviality originates in the search for alternatives to the instrumental use of technologies in industrial societies. Although these two rationalities predominantly go hand in hand in the development of modern societies, they are sometimes in conflict and different strategies are required to deal with their consequences. Therefore, the differences between degrowth and conviviality should not be obscured. Instead of using the concepts in an ethical or moral fashion as normative claims directed at some diffuse agency of states, companies and the people, the paper argues for a thorough examination of issues and propositions to overcome the environmental crisis from the perspective of materialist science and technology studies. Since one key factor here is the level of global production and consumption of meat, this paper turns toward a controversial attempt to break new ground in meat production: the vision of artificially producing meat in the laboratory. Lab-grown, cultured meat provides a powerful case study for exploring political and democratic challenges of post-growth societies, all the more so as questions of animal welfare and interspecies conviviality are addressed as well. By taking a closer look at the role of animals in proposed solutions for degrowth and conviviality in meat production and consumption, the complementarity of such claims can be questioned, and a light can be shed on the inherent political implications of such technological innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasiveness of preventive rationality, which is especially evident in populations caught in the prison-neighbourhood circuit, constitutes a challenging field for anthropological theory because it allows us to rethink the problem of hegemony in the context of the crises of capitalism. Drawing on research conducted in Chile amongst practitioners of crime prevention programmes and prisoners' families targeted by such initiatives, in this paper, we explore crime prevention as a political concept whose effects are inseparable from the maintenance of class and gender disparities. In conceptualising how petty crime prevention has become a predominant technology of classifying, policing and managing low-income populations, we take Foucault's notion of illegalism – as distinct from illegality – and extend it to dispossessed groups affected by dramatic levels of economic inequality and structural violence. We discuss preventive rationality in relation to the contradictions engendered by an authoritarian form of capitalism protected by constitutional constraints inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. By connecting the conceptualisation of petty crime prevention to the ongoing contradictions of the society in which we live, we seek to sharpen attention to the ways in which the neoliberal hegemony attempts to contain its decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists' tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]