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Building on Deleuze and Guattari's theorising of transversality, this paper offers an ethnography of life-with-oil in the city of Esmeraldas, home to Ecuador's largest oil refinery complex and a chokepoint of the country's oil export logistics. The paper elaborates how desires, struggles, and wagers that shape everyday life in the city, which appear peripheral to the formal circulation of oil, are in fact constitutive of how hydrocarbon capital is enacted. Transversal desires move in and out of the logistics of oil flow, sometimes hosting and facilitating, other times choking the dynamics of said flow. I rely on the aesthetics and potentialities of the ethnographic ground to get at the disruptions, ruptures, and shifts through which transversal flows become part of the logistics of oil flow in Esmeraldas, and to remain attentive to what is obscured in master narratives about oil in capitalist systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This microhistory of a shoreline place in Thailand details the socio-natural process by which a piece of coastal land came to be recognised as private property by the state. It demonstrates that intimate and long-term attention to specificities of how property comes into being has more explanatory power than synoptic theorisations of accumulation and dispossession. Using ethnography, archives and affective co-narration, this paper probes the shifting ground of water and land to show how the fluidity of water plays a key role in the politics and legal procedures of enclosure, and how fluctuating boundaries become an ambiguous arena for property claims contestations amid entanglements of slippery legal semantics. It argues that the expanded notion of agency in the Anthropocene presents new challenges for thinking about property relations, and that thinking from a shoreline place of shifting water-land boundaries engenders novel questions to do with fluid dispossessions at a time of rising oceans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines interrelated dichotomies in social anthropology and cross-cultural research on advance care directives (ACDs). It aims to recast the disjuncture between individual (Western) selves and collectivist (non-Western) Others that has impeded understandings of the cultural complexities of decision-making at the end of life. Based on research conducted with Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian communities living in Adelaide, South Australia, it explores how ACDs can obscure the vicissitudes of bodies and social life, decontextualising and detracting from our emplacement in relational worlds. Drawing on Ingold's approach to living beings as a bundle of lines that join together, a 'meshwork' that carries on, I trace the continuities and points of tension, or 'knots', interwoven in movements and metaphors of writing up advance care directives, signing consent, opening doors and caring through touch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Faya in northern Chad, women frequently and ordinarily fight each other in public, using knives and swords and seeking to inflict serious wounds; they are generally proud of their martial prowess. This simple observation sits uneasily with an older ethnography on northern Chad and the Sahara more generally. It is also only partially encompassed by conceptualisations of violence, and in particular female violence, current in anthropological analysis. This paper argues that violence in this context needs to be seen not as the result of a breakdown of social relations, but rather as intrinsic to them. Nor is it simply a means to an end ('conflict-resolution'), but rather part and parcel of aspirations towards a particular kind of gendered personhood, in a context where the management of local affairs tends to be in the hand of women, and is dependent on but not necessarily encompassed by male spheres of activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory's insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared with future generations. If much attention has been paid to the narrative forms that traumatic plots take from the perspective of adults, our work is motivated by a fidelity to the voice of the child, and the ways in which they piece a world together from the debris of social life that they find around them. We are interested in exploring what this piecing together of the world might reveal in terms of the embedding of memories of violence in the textures of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology can be broadly characterised as an optimistic discipline. Exploring the ways in which different groups confront particular ends and end-time scenarios, whether through rituals and ceremonies, myths and legends, or through local manners of coping with the aftermath of political and ecological ends, anthropologists have been particularly inventive and productive in thinking through ends and endings. Examining different narratives of ends and endings, they also shed light on the future, which, as Vidal and Dias explain, 'is imagined less as a continuation of the present than as a time in which the present ... will no longer be' ([54]: 5). Encounters with Millenarian movements, particularly in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia (Roscoe [46]; Robbins [42]; Stephen [49]) but also elsewhere (Stewart & Harding [50]; Pessar [37]), have led anthropologists to consider the ways in which doomsday scenarios shape everyday lives. [Extracted from the article]

This paper addresses some of the complexities surrounding the endeavour to create a protected space for children. Based on an ethnographic account of a kindergarten in a small town in the north of Israel during 2001, it explores notions of vulnerability and danger, protection and exposure, as these found expression in daily life at the kindergarten. The paper describes, and links, two sets of ethnographic data: first, the routine ways in which the teacher constructed the children's bodies as ever vulnerable to harm of all sorts, unless well taken care of; and second, the way in which a suicide bomb attack was presented, and mediated, by the teacher to the children. The paper argues that a close look at these two different stances on death and danger reveals a 'discourse of vulnerability' at the kindergarten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While anthropological scholarship on the life course transitions of young people has aimed to contribute to theories of structure and agency, social reproduction and change, it has done so relatively independently from the anthropological literature on subject formation. This paper explores how subjectivity - how people feel, think, and experience - is implicated in grappling with life course transitions. It addresses how ‘being serious’ is considered a critical adult competency and its achievement delineates a key life transition that young women in western Kenya variously resent and value, resist and seek. The analysis illuminates ways in which people grapple with their own subjectivity as a problem as well as a project, and how such problems and projects of subjectivity are problems and projects of social reproduction. I argue that taking account of such subjective transformations can augment political economy analysis of meanings and modes of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to elaborate the dynamics through which food acquires potency in shaping human life and organisation as it takes shape in enacting ritual transformation. I argue that whereas life and various existential concerns get condensed from the fringes of the social order into ritual, food further holographically condenses the existential concerns of life with which it is entangled as an assemblage. As such, it turns into a centripetal force in ritual by constituting a means that enables ritual and somatic transformation to materialize in the matter of food and thus in helping to render ritual effective. To grasp this complex process we will look at the basic dynamic of holographic condensation throughout the different ways in which various foods ritually enact the regeneration of life in the astrological New Year and the Sātuwe anti-sorcery healing rite in a Sinhalese Buddhist village in the North-Western province of Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing recent ethnographic work on the subjective experiences of those involved in traumatic events, this paper examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are only now beginning to surface, and the paper considers the transition from the private experience of suffering to its public telling. It focuses on how people find a voice for their telling and what happens as a result of breaking the silence. Of special interest is the language and style in which the narratives enter the public domain, and the silences that remain. The paper argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communal identity as by individual experience, and thereby complements the trauma literature that tends to emphasise the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can ethnographers see the ‘big picture’, while they are busy with everyday minutiae? Awareness of the local impacts of history and globalisation has revived debates about the pragmatics of fieldwork. Arguing that most fieldwork remains, for most practitioners, ‘local’, this paper explores how it is possible to apprehend change ethnographically. Something of how local people understand and experience change, as it happens to them and around them and as they contribute to it, can be grasped in ‘significant local imagery’, in this case, ‘significant people’, ‘significant things’, and ‘significant events’. These images are recognised in local discourse as indicative or ‘telling’ of change, and can be used to summarise analytically, and shed light on, wider vistas of change. This paper presents three local images deriving from fieldwork in a small town in mid-Jutland and uses them to tell a bigger story, a narrative about the modernisation of Danish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of anthropology, charismatic individuals have often played a major role in the creation and institutionalization of the discipline. Although current Israeli anthropology has been greatly influenced by contemporary theoretical trends and professional genres, one can still observe the impact of Max Gluckman's Manchester School project of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper will examine the success and failure of this research endeavor, which sought to reveal the process of community and nation-building in the aftermath of mass immigration from Europe and the Middle East. The paper will also discuss the existing professional scene and the social constraints that influenced the development of anthropology in Israeli academia before and after the Manchester project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the emergence of the Slow Food Movement, an international consumer movement dedicated to the protection of 'endangered foods.' The history of one of these 'endangered foods', lardo di Colonnata , provides the ethnographic window through which I examine Slow Food's cultural politics. The paper seeks to understand the politics of 'slowness' within current debates over European identity, critiques of neo-liberal models of rationality, and the significant ideological shift towards market-driven politics in advanced capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a period of intense risk construction in Spain. By autumn 2000 there was a coincidence of different alarming events affecting Spanish society and widely covered by media. A feeling of risk extended all around and the Spanish political agenda was, for a time, dominated by risk issues. This paper tries to establish how useful the concept of 'risk shadow' can be in order to analyse the construction of risk in a global context. The narratives of risk seem to give this phenomenon its cultural consistency, because more than a scientific fact, risk construction is a cultural matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the workings of various kinds of 'capital' in the early lives of one cohort, the Class of '58 of a U.S. High School. Bourdieu's valuable concept of capital as both material and cultural/symbolic is augmented with the idea of 'psychological' capital, a concept meant to begin to fill a gap in Bourdieu's framework concerning the complexity of desires, intentions, and 'personalities' in acting subjects. The paper also tackles some problems of ethnographic and ethnohistorical representation, suggesting the value of an analogy with several sub-genres of documentary films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on performances of Korean folk culture in Japanese schools and communities to analyse how minority identities are constructed. Korean minority education in Japan has taken up the challenge of reversing the stigma attached to former colonial subjects, employing a range of tangible props what Twine (1999) calls ‘racial literacy’ which prepares racial minority children to cope with and challenge racism at large. While embodying identity expression through Korean folk dance performances is an effective strategy, it faces constraints from larger social forces. Korean dance and music performances do little to challenge the dominance of mainstream values. These performances are embedded in everyday family, school, and community practices and paradoxically reproduce existing gender roles, broader pedagogical ideologies, and social structures. This ethnographic case study disentangles contradictions in minority education and shows commitment to alterity accompanies disavowal of alterity in relation to the hegemonic Japanese culture and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through what kind of inaugural scenes is the moral self born? And what are the practices, within that scene, through which one tries to become a moral person, or a different sort of moral self, a person one is not but wishes to be? These questions are at the heart of the recent ethical turn in anthropology and sociocultural studies more broadly. In this paper, I explore three moral imaginaries: the trial, the artisan workshop and the moral laboratory. Turning to ethnographic material, I compare how these social imaginaries illuminate the moral work of people engaged in trying to create good lives for themselves and those they care about. Drawing upon a long-term study of a group of African-American families caring for children with significant illnesses and disabilities, I examine people's attempts to transform not only themselves but also the social and material spaces in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When discussing the politics of ethnicity in Rwanda, most authors discount the role of Twa. Because the latter are Rwanda's least numerous ethnic group, the tendency is to dismiss their importance. This dismissal may seem justified in instrumental terms, but it is not true in symbolic terms. Twa were the first of Rwanda's three ethnicities to suffer stigmatization, and this predated European colonialism by several centuries. If we think about ethnicity according to an instrumentalist model, placing primary causal weight on social rather than cultural factors, we misconstrue how Rwanda's pre-colonial opposition of disgust vs. esteem provided fertile grounds for later European biological determinism. Practices of avoidance in commensality, marriage, and other activities - called 'kuneena batwa' - lie at the heart of this opposition. This paper traces its processual development, demonstrating that it is incorrect to think of Rwandan ethnicity either in purely instrumentalist terms or in simple binary cultural terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the idea of dwelling in the field, this paper explores the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families. Through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts - one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996 -97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004-05 - I interrogate what it means to inhabit the field. In the world of multi-sited ethnography all research sites are not created equal; both in terms of the kinds of data one can collect and the types of observations one can make. How ethnographers are situated in a web of affliations affects their experience in the field, what they observe, and their research practice. I propose renewed attention to how anthropologists live in the field, including how relationships are interpreted in the field by ethnographers and their informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the debates surrounding Clifford's paper 'Traveling Cultures' and its argument that greater attention should be paid to 'routes' as well as 'roots' in anthropological research. It is based on research into the socio-cultural effects and outcomes of migration amongst the Yakkha, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group originating in the middle hills of East Nepal. It considers the methodological implications of Clifford's approach through the description and analysis of thirty-six hours spent in the company of a Yakkha family and friends in the Nepalese Tarai, serendipitously encountered while the author was 'en route'. The conclusion drawn is that Clifford's 'strong' form of 'fieldwork as travel practice' is more difficult to justify than his 'softer' suggestion that 'routes' and 'roots' be studied together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic texts preserve the historicity and losses of both the people observed and their observer. However, anthropologists rarely inform their readers about the circumstances of their departure from a fieldwork project. Without formally indicating the completion of their research goals, they usually move on to a new field and cease publishing on their former site. This procedure seemed natural enough when anthropologists conducted their studies in remote Third World locations. The constraints of distance, time, and budget made that abrupt separation seemingly inevitable and self-explanatory. But when anthropologists choose fieldwork sites that are close to home or easy to revisit, or conduct long-term research, their relationships with their subjects change radically, both during fieldwork and during the stages of writing and publishing the ethnographic text. Consequently, their eventual exit from the field involves a different process. Based on the experience of a fifteenyear engagement in the study of a gay synagogue in New York, this paper explores the latter process. The issue of exiting presents a methodological, emotional, and ethical problem meriting serious professional consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay dwells on the intersection of three historical contemporaries: (1) American anthropology's ‘reflexive turn’; (2) the rise of Michel Foucault's motif of ‘the gaze’ within anthropology; and (3) the spread of the aesthetics of ‘white nihilism.’ The intersection materializes in the visual trope of self-reflexivity. White nihilism, according to one account, is a self-loathing kind of reflexive gaze, preemptive of criticism and desirous of self-possession. The paper argues that Foucault's idea of the panoptic gaze had a similar effect on anthropological self-reflexivity. The essay contrasts the American reception of Foucault with the case of Francophone anthropology – including ‘the Other Foucault’ – in which self-reflexivity involves self-loss or self-division. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much anthropological critical reflection has centred on the act of text production. In particular, anthropologists have become concerned to understand the strategic status of their own texts and to seek to impose new constraints on their writing. In this paper, I want to explore further the kind of knowledge anthropologists can have of text. However, my focus is not on the dynamics of language and composition, but rather on the consequences of reception. This emphasis derives from my ethnography of UK webloggers (online journal keepers), a group of text producers for whom publication is automatic, the beginning rather than the endpoint of any claim to knowing. Their concern is with the practical mediatory role of weblogs, which includes exploring the kinds of persons these digital texts can become and the kinds of relations they can be shown to contain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To counter an ahistorical emphasis on 'malangan' in studies of New Ireland culture, this paper examines the historical emergence, among the Lelet people, of new cultural forms. My example is the dramatic new kinds of dance and associated magic that have been acquired from other parts of Papua New Guinea. These importations have changed people's perception of the world in which they make their lives. I argue that part of the appeal of these new cultural forms is that they open the door to new more potent forms of power, allowing the Lelet to widen their capacity to act as agents in the enlarged regional arena and power networks of the colonial and post-colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bhats are low-status bards from the Indian state of Rajasthan. This paper explores a Bhat puppet drama sponsored by a state-run bank meant to teach Indians an ethic of saving and planning for the future. Specifically, it examines the manner in which Bhats sabotage their work for the bank, mocking the values they are hired to promote and thus 'resisting' modernist ideologies that purportedly allow for the rational management of time. Still, Bhat dramas are not only conventional political weapons that turn the world upside-down, but also poetic devices that potentially raise the consciousness of audience members so that they themselves might resist. In fact, this play, in the manner it speaks truth to power and thus teaches others to resist in thought or action, resembles the Bhats' traditional praise-work for their formerly Untouchable patrons. I therefore suggest that the Bhats' 'subaltern consciousness,' like their insights into the discursive construction of modern authority, is tightly intertwined with local performance traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the imagery of state and nation in post-apartheid South Africa, and more specifically on the use of 'Bushmen' or 'San' in the symbolic reconstruction of national unity through South Africa's new motto and Coat of Arms. The Coat of Arms is based on a redrawing of a figure from rock art, while the motto !Ke e: /xarra //ke (officially translated 'Diverse people unite') comes from the extinct /Xam language once spoken in the Northern Cape. The choice of the figure and of the language of the motto were deliberate, and explicitly evoke the idea of Bushman as ancestral man and original South African, while the meaning of the motto (much criticized in contemporary South Africa) is shown here to be much richer than previously known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a 'register of recovery' that emerged in post-crisis and post-neoliberal Argentina as a way of imagining and framing an increasingly disparate collection of persons, things, and ideas, from young workers, to green space, to hose pipes. Drawing on ethnography conducted at the NuevaMente recycling cooperative in Morón, Greater Buenos Aires, the article attends to the material implications stemming from the adoption of the rather hopeful concept of recovery, and the counter-models proposed by young workers, who view the workplace as a space not of cathartic recovery, but of temporary care and respite from the complications of family life. By emphasising the recovery of workers into the formal economy, their rich labour histories are deliberately unknown, while a focus on the recoverability of things ignores not only their lack of value, but also their potential hazardousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ways of reinserting anthropological perspective to the studies of festivals and carnivals. These include showcasing an anthropological research on festivals, contribution for an in-depth ethnographic research and collection of studies in systematic analysis. Also mentions the ecological approach between anthropology and festivals.

Bureaucracy is often portrayed as having an unrivalled capacity to shape human relationships in states and organisations. By contrast, however, ethnographic studies have suggested that bureaucracy cannot easily take root among Somalis and other Muslim nomadic societies where kinship is ostensibly supreme. Based on ethnographic research at Dagahaley refugee camp, this article challenges the idea that Somali kinship and bureaucratic structures are rival governing technologies. I demonstrate that kinship and bureaucracy play similar roles and are, therefore, not incompatible. Kinship provided traction to bureaucratic procedures in the way people used it alongside bureaucracy as means of governance and resource access. The article contributes to legal and political anthropology, as well as the burgeoning field of ethnography of bureaucracy by attributing common portrayals of civil wars, ethnicity, and nepotism as 'nomadic' or 'African' problems to commentators' failure to grasp the value of kinship in these societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the rise of capitalist modernity, communities across the world have been convinced by the potential of development and progress. This article steps aside from the idea of continuous and unilinear change, and examines contemporary afterlives of broken developmentalist dreams. By assembling ethnographies from countries politically defined as growth-engines in three different regions of the world (Brazil, Germany and India), we propose that development no longer inspires the same aspirations about progress. By exploring how material decay and shattered expectations become intimately woven into the everyday experiences of local populations, we show how the ruinous effects of pursuing economic growth leaves ordinary people to a life on their own terms. At this current historical juncture, we argue for the analytical productiveness of exploring 'the after' rather than 'the otherwise'. This is pursued through an interrogation of the irregular rhythms of 'life after progress'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the resonances of the voluminous ethnography, 'Stone Men of Malekula' (SMM) in contemporary Vanuatu. Anthropological research is politically charged in Vanuatu, in part because of how the weighty materiality of archival forms exercise significant local authority. However, alongside respect for this 'evidential' material is a healthy scepticism of anthropological authority. SMM, written by the maverick anthropologist John Layard in 1942 (based on fieldwork in 1914-15), has returned to Vanuatu in many guises over the years. It is used as formal evidence in land disputes and as a bone of contention within competing claims. Tracing the ways in which culture is written, read and materialized, exposes the paradoxes of knowledge and politics not only within anthropological critique but in Vanuatu villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on the troubled relationship between anthropology and the military, we do so by discussing the underlying epistemological, methodological, and moral claims of the distinction between an anthropology of and an anthropology for the military. Through the term ethnography of things military, we propose to reposition military anthropology as intense engagements with militarisation through empathic immersion in things military. We develop this term through feminist critiques of militarisation and compassion, through discussions of critique and empathy as part of (critical) ethnographic scholarship, and through anthropological debates about the relationality of fieldwork and ethnographer-interlocutor relations. Suggesting that an ethnography of things military relies on empathic engagements with military lifeworlds, we argue that the relationship between empathy and critique in military anthropology should be understood as a continuous collaborative (and not always predictable) process of interrogating military lifeworlds' frames of reference without necessarily sharing compassion or sympathy for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whenever we discuss fieldwork experiences with fellow anthropologists working on "things military", concerns over ethics, politics, and critique pop up as a matter of course. But beyond that, it seemed like joining the military was likely to force my perspective into a single scale, to wed me to the questions of "military culture" that seemed to suck the politics out of so many of the texts I'd read by anthropologists and sociologists who had been members of those militaries themselves. As such, and resonating here with Sarah's and Jean's reflections upon how their ethnographic concerns with things military have on occasion been viewed in terms of naïve alignment or even militarised co-optation, I have also encountered disciplinary suspicion when doing and presenting ethnographic work on things military, particularly work exploring the contours of military pleasure, as have colleagues working on similar concerns. [Extracted from the article]

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordanian women are expected to exemplify the multiple – and sometimes contradictory – values that their families, nations, and faiths espouse. Ethnographies of contemporary Jordan attend to the ways women articulate their own interpretations of what constitutes appropriate female behaviour within the discursive frame of these values. But how do women living within this discursive frame feel about living in, and thinking in, this discursive frame? As women engage with social expectations for female behaviour to consider how they should act, their nuanced considerations resemble the kind of reflection that can be taken as freedom. However, their reflections emphasise the ways in which they feel restricted. This felt unfreedom raises questions about the way relationships and the feelings that arise within them come to bear on ethical reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article produces a theologically engaged anthropology of hope by examining the function of theological precepts in generating and maintaining hope in the everyday secular life of their adherents. It explores a practical theology of hope practised in a transnational Hindu organisation, BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, and examines the tensions and complexities of theistic hope by asking two questions: What sort of meaning-making frameworks of hope does BAPS create from its theological teachings? How do BAPS practitioners employ these frameworks to negotiate their everyday secular concerns and effect ethical subjectivation? Drawing on the ethnographic research conducted during 2015–17, this article attends to ambivalences and apprehensions in the daily lives of BAPS members to show how their experiential narratives substantiate and yet complicate the mainstream anthropological conceptions of hope. It demonstrates how a practical theology of hope and a social anthropology of hope can inform, transform and complement one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an introduction to the June 2003 issue of the periodical "Ethnos."

Recent calls for 'other-than-human' ethnographies draw attention to dimensions of life that have allegedly been overlooked or marginalised in anthropological writings. We take such critique as an opportunity to reconsider selected ethnographic accounts asking: What was the role of animals and plants in these accounts, and what 'hidden stories' may be discerned in texts and images? What might an informed and careful reading teach us about relations of ethnographic production beyond the human, and about the disciplinary conventions shaping how these relations could (or could not) be conveyed? Juxtaposing older ethnographic texts with state of the art ethnographic insight from the same region, we show that ethnographic attention to the 'other-than-human' is not new, but its mode of expression has been thwarted: Shifting theoretical concerns, and human exceptionalism, have shaped ethnographic writing and rendered such modes of knowing less significant than they might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amateur studies a subject for the love of it, as a way of life. This article tracks the changing relationship between amateur scholarship and professionalism, in light of the author's experience over five decades. It shows how the capture of professionalism by corporate and managerial interests has brought it into tension with the principles of amateur study, and how this tension has played out specifically in anthropology. Here, the amateur commitment to day-to-day knowing, enshrined in the discipline's signature approach of participant observation, is compromised by its professional rebranding as ethnography. The approach nevertheless sets an example for other walks of study that share with anthropology the urge to wander along with that which captures their attention. Today's professionalised regimes of research leave little room for wandering. Abjuring the straitjacket of corporate professionalism, however, opens the way for an amateur scholarship that is both practically activist and potentially transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a re-reading of one of Philippe Descola's earliest works, La Selva Culta, Simbolismo y Praxis en la Ecología de los Achuar. Despite Descola's focus on the relation between natural domains, consanguinity, affinity and marriage, this book's rich descriptions show the Achuar's understandings of non-human sociability. The book also gives insight into the mutually constitutive assemblies of which human plants and animals form part. In later work, Descola reinterprets the ethnography of La Selva Culta, now with a focus on the human/non-human relationship. I explore the openings and closures of these new interpretations, and see them in relation to the possibilities and blind zones that conceptual tools related to more-than-human approaches may offer. In the discussion of the latter, I draw on my own work on the Runa, and reflect on the implications for more-than-human approaches when, as Descola suggests, humanness exceeds the concept of 'the human'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Thomson is a legendary Australian anthropologist particularly noted for his early fieldwork in Northern Australia. He lived for extended periods in remote areas in Cape York then Arnhem Land from 1929 until 1943. While in the field, he made meticulous ethnographic and natural history fieldnotes, took aesthetically beautiful photographs and amassed a particularly large museum collection. Thomson made a delineation between his academic publications on anthropology-related subjects and those that related to natural history, reflecting the epistemological divide during his lifetime. Aboriginal engagement with different animals is hard to find by reading classic ethnographic texts, which tend to refer to animals as human symbols or totems, rather than as living beings of significance. Thomson's fieldwork is exemplary, in terms of showing how anthropologists can utilise a combination of detailed observation, visual ethnography and zoological findings in order to enrich our understandings of relations between other cultures and other animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how social control in the Filipino diaspora now works through social media surveillance, brokering exchanges of care between activists, on the one hand, and migrants, on the other. Taking care as the 'pursuit of connections' (Yates-Doerr, Emily. Care: Provocation. Cultural Anthropology, Fieldnotes: Care. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/497-care-provocation, March 17, 2014), I outline the history of care-for-control exchanges between migrants and leftist activists. Setting out the cultural norms for reciprocity that shape Filipino expectations for care and political allegiance, I explore how they have travelled within the diaspora. I describe the emergence of 'ambient surveillance' – ubiquitous and middle-distance mutual observation that pervades everyday diasporic life – on social media. As care: control exchanges have shifted from face-to-face encounters to ambient surveillance via social networking platform, they continue to limit particular kinds of political participation among migrants and may be excluding reluctant, jaded or dissenting migrants from migration research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A seller's sincerity is important for the viability of his/her business. This claim is substantiated ethnographically through a study of the challenges fashionably veiled designer-entrepreneurs face in Turkey. Their fashionable veil raises suspicion. Their critics claim they are not as devout as they want to appear. The performance of their piety through public-facing social media further nourishes mistrust. Their critics think this is driven by pragmatic calculation rather than religiosity. They respond to this criticism, arguing for the sincerity of their piety and striving to make their businesses work. The ethical dimension in any act of selling, as either reality or expectation, is hence brought to the foreground. Simultaneously, by emphasising the importance of the digital in the proclamation or, on the contrary, trivialisation of faith, a line of thinking that connects sincerity, piety and the material in the discussion of Islam is updated through the addition of the (im)material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on processes of urban confinement, and the fact that these often do not generate significant forms of political contestation, despite their obviously negative socio-spatial consequences. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork begun in 1996 in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, it begins by describing a specific instance of urban confinement illustrating what Merrifield (2014) has aptly described as 'neo-Haussmannisation'. It then goes on to explore how this can have variable consequences through four 'archetypal' gang member life trajectories, in particular showing how contestation is only one of several possible reactions to urban confinement, and that its emergence is based on a very particular dialectical articulation of agency and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the strategies employed by colonial authorities to ‘manage’ Indigenous people, forced removal and centralisation to townships was a deliberate attempt to fragment relationships to home territories. For Yanyuwa, an Indigenous group in northern Australia, this meant being removed from their saltwater ‘country’ in the Gulf of Carpentaria and resettled 60 km inland. Despite this violent act Yanyuwa saltwater identity has remained strong. Whilst enduring, it has however undergone changes in the way relationships to place are established and maintained. Travelling through saltwater country with younger and middle generation Yanyuwa has revealed that sometimes relationships to place are marked by conditions of fear, nervousness and uncertainty. Not classically held to be dispositions of a ‘proper’ Indigenous person, these reveal that states of intimacy require time and certain conditions to flourish. So too, distance, signalled by fear and uncertainty, is a relational state that defines a vitally important relationship with country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the collaborative use of what the authors call ‘perspectival obstructions’. Taking its outset in the events revolving around a series of challenges given to each other, as well as to their interlocutors, in Papua New Guinea, the article unfolds how obstructions may be tied to a radical shift in perspective that allows partly for the invisible and absent to emerge as visible and present, and for different potentialities of persons and social relations to be brought to light. Hence the article demonstrates how obstruction and intervention as parts of the ethnographic methodology may help elicit perspectives that are otherwise kept hidden (deliberately or not), such as power-relations or the occluded side of a friendship or a kinship relation. This, in turn, also poses a danger to the otherwise collaborative ideal of modern ethnographic fieldwork in literally challenging and affecting ‘the natives' point of view’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article chronicles collaboration between artists and anthropologists in producing an installation at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization, Geneva, in June 2013. It was an opportunistic ‘second act’ to a long-term ethnographic research project that preceded it. For anthropology, it constitutes an experiment in ‘second-order observation’ that involves different senses of being and acting in field research than within classic norms of ethnographic method. Though valued marginally, art is a more conventional presence at the WTO than something as exotic as ethnography was. Thus the scene was set for a mutually challenging collaboration that is still being explored by its participants beyond the period of intervention and presence in Geneva. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the roundtable discussion presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists' biennial conference held in Tallinn, Estonia on July 31 through August 3, 2014 is presented. The aim of the discussion explores the meaning of anthropology for LGBT people and its contribution to the discipline after its emergence in the academia. The discussion was participated by several anthropologists including Paul Boyce, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo.

Using the place-naming practices in the small settler society of Norfolk Island, the home of Anglo-Polynesian descendants of theBountymutineers, we advance a linguistic argument against Saussure's claims concerning the arbitrariness of signs. When extended to place names, Saussure's claims about language in general imply place names in themselves hold no significance for how people interact with places. In contrast, we use ethnographic examples to show that people of Norfolk Island interact with the significance of the names themselves. Arguments for an integrated approach to toponymy in which place names are considered alongside other relational (cultural, economic and historical) factors that influence their use and meaning are put forward. We propose ‘toponymic ethnography’ as a useful methodology for understanding the connectedness of toponyms to people, place, and social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the interrelation between law and hope in the context of constitutional change in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon ethnographic and textual data, it is shown that the constitution has acquired particular discursive importance in Kyrgyzstan each time the foundations of the state have been severely challenged or shattered. Paying particular attention to three major political conflicts, the article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of each, speeches, performances, presentations and conversations were infused with ‘constitutional faith’, binding together the political elite and ordinary citizens in an expression of their general hope that constitutional change could bring about a better future. I view constitutional faith as a practice of hope that allows people to actively engage with their being-in-the-world, particularly in times of crisis. In the aftermath of large-scale political conflict, with which I am concerned here, it can become a faith-based mode of conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]