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Grappling with the Legacies of Anthro-Cast Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-04 Chip Colwell, Danilyn Rutherford
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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The Earliest Taphonomic Evidence of Rabbit Exploitation by Humans in the Northwestern Mediterranean at Terra Amata (Nice, France) Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-04 Jacqueline S. Meier, Khalid El Guennouni, Patricia Valensi, Anne-Marie Moigne, Eugène Morin
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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Embodying the State in the Margins Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-03 Erol Saglam
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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The Feel of Climate Change Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-30 Karine Gagné
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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Quantities of Qualia Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-28 Adrienne Cohen
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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On epistemic aporias and the coloniality of (my) categories American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2025-01-28 Laura A. Meek
This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head‐switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly
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Inhorn, Marcia C. & LuciaVolk (eds). Un‐settling Middle Eastern refugees. 316 pp., 20 illus., bibliogr. New York: Berghahn, 2021. $19.95 (paper) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-25 Carlos Vélez‐Ibáñez
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Marks on the floor. Instant and memory in the foundation of an agro-pastoralist place in the Puna high desert, Northwest Argentina (ca. 1500 BP) Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 Pilar Babot, Álvaro Martel
A set of visual representations and marks made on the red plastered floor within a domestic enclosure, are analyzed. They belong to low scale agro-pastoralist societies that inhabited the Argentine Puna in the South Central Andes, ca. 1500 BP. The prepared floor would have configured a proper surface for a multisensory ritual performance. This type of material is reserved for specific places such as
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The fraudulent family American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 Sophia Balakian
In 2012 the US government began requiring DNA testing in its Refugee Family Reunification Program, which was primarily used by refugees from African countries. The policy was established to allay concerns that refugees were committing “family‐composition fraud,” or including people outside their families in their resettlement and reunification cases. In humanitarian contexts “fraud” has often been
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Diaspora, tradition, and progress: Archaeology of Alexandria, Virginia’s German Jewish community Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-19 Tatiana Niculescu
This article seeks to develop a formal framework for studying the American Jewish diaspora archaeologically, using Alexandria, Virginia’s turn of the 20th century community as a case study. Moving beyond simple ethnic markers and tacking among several analytical scales, this approach explores how material culture and space both reflected and helped create new social identities. A few themes emerge
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Hunting to herding on the Andean Altiplano: Zooarchaeological insights into Archaic Period subsistence in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru (9.0–3.5 ka) Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-19 Sarah J. Noe, Randall Haas, Mark Aldenderfer
This study examines the subsistence strategies of Archaic Period inhabitants (9.0–3.5 cal. ka) of the Lake Titicaca Basin, located in the high Andes of South America. Faunal data from three Archaic Period sites in the Ilave region of Peru are used to explore the dietary habits of early foragers spanning over five millennia. Comparative analysis reveals heavy investment in camelids, with deer serving
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Unveiling the spatial structure of rock painting designs and information flow among hunter-gatherers in southern Patagonia Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-16 M.Cecilia Pallo, Judith Charlin, Marcelo Cardillo, Paula D. Funes, Liliana M. Manzi
Recent rock art research in the Pali Aike volcanic field (PAVF, southern Argentina and Chile) expanded the chronology (ca. 3100B.P.) and morphological and technical repertoire of abstract-geometric and figurative paintings of the “Río Chico style”. This paper discusses the spatial distribution of painted motifs to understand the criteria that guided the representation strategies and the flow of information
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Embodying God: ritual, value, and secular‐sacred entanglements in Norwegian folk high school education Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Jamie Glisson
This paper explores the role of Lutheran ritual in value formations in Norwegian folk high school education. Folk high schools, subsidized by the state, offer gap year programs that are meant to instil values in young adult students before they attend higher education or enter the workforce. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Christian folk high school in south‐eastern Norway
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Tensors in Ethnography: A Comment on Stroeken 2023 Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-09 André van Dokkum
Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, Page 1121-1122, December 2024.
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Front Matter Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-09
Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, December 2024.
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Front Cover Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-09
Current Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 6, December 2024.
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Short-distance hunting strategies of Late Quaternary foragers in the miombo woodlands of Malawi Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Alex Bertacchi, Potiphar Kaliba, Jessica C. Thompson
The Economic Defendability Model posits that foragers exploiting dense and predictable resources should establish defended territories, while foragers exploiting unpredictable resources manage shortfall risk by ranging across larger areas that they do not invest in defending. While these expectations are supported by ethnographic observations, archaeological tests have been limited to peri-aquatic
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Improperty American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2025-01-07 Myles Lennon
The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people's efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or
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I was wrong when I studied Russian nuclear weapons scientists American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2025-01-06 Hugh Gusterson
Having successfully completed fieldwork in a US nuclear weapons community, I went to Russia to interview a handful of the country's nuclear weapons scientists. Epistemologically, I made the mistake of viewing them more as variant weapons designers rather than as Russians. More seriously, I failed to think through in advance the risks to myself and to my human subjects of interviewing important national
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Editors’ note American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2025-01-06 L. L. Wynn, Susanna Trnka, Jesse Hession Grayman
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To make a difference: responding to migration's demands in returns to Cuba Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-06 Valerio Simoni
The article focuses on the predicaments faced by return migrants to Cuba and how they respond to societal pressures to make a valuable difference ‘back home’, opening analytical avenues at the juncture of the anthropology of ethics and morality and migration. It does so by uncovering five distinct but complementary ways in which returnees respond to migration‐related demands. Conceptualized as efforts
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Beyond a logic of choice: the role of family narratives in ethical, person‐centred support for individuals with intellectual disabilities Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-06 Aaron J. Jackson
This article demonstrates the important role family narratives can play in providing ethical, person‐centred support for people with severe intellectual disabilities living in supported accommodation. Focusing on the story of Daniel, a 65‐year‐old man residing in a group home in Australia, I illustrate, through the lens of his mother Arleen, how family narratives foreground those with intellectual
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Making kw’éts’tel: A materialization of household food-focused labor Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2025-01-03 Anthony P. Graesch, David M. Schaepe, Nathan Goodale, Hector Salazar, Moriah McKenna, Sarah Harris, Andrew Prunk, Annette Davis, Roy James Walton, John Rissmiller
Salmon fishing and storage have been integral elements of Stó:lō-Coast Salish household life, economy, and identity in the Fraser Valley and lower Fraser Canyon of southwestern British Columbia for millennia. However, taphonomic factors affecting salmon remains make it difficult to directly study variability in food-related labor allocations, prompting us to focus instead on fish processing tools.
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More than bureaucratic objects: the mothers of the disappeared in Mexico and the potentialities of their investigation files Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-03 Isaac Vargas
The crisis of disappearances in Mexico started in 2006, when then‐president Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs framed by a military perspective. Since then, more than 111,000 disappearances have been reported nationwide. Faced with this panorama of violence and uncertainty, a bureaucratic body has emerged which attempts to manage the search by, and mourning of, families who are still waiting
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Forager and food producer interrelationships in the zooarchaeological record: Lessons from Central Africa Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-12-29 Karen D. Lupo, Nicolette M. Edwards, Dave N. Schmitt
Faunal taxonomic abundances and composition are often used as one line of evidence to measure different dimensions of prehistoric population interaction between food producers and foragers. This paper presents a comparative analysis of ethnoarchaeological faunas created by neighboring foragers and farmers in Central Africa who maintain on-going interactions based partly on the exchange of wild resources
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Racket sociality: investigating intimidation in North India Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-29 Lucia Michelutti
This article is an ethnographic investigation into acts of intimidation and threats. Theoretically, it dialogues with ‘racket’ – a key analytical term in the sociology of domination, state‐making, and mafias. The anthropology of power, violence, and crime has paid scant attention to the morphology of threats and the ways interpersonal intimidation intertwines with economic and political forms of coercion
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Against interpretive exclusivism* Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-29 Harvey Whitehouse
Interpretive exclusivism is the dogma that we can only understand cultural systems by interpreting them, thereby ruling out causal explanations of cultural phenomena using scientific methods, for example based on measurement, comparison, and experiment. In this article, I argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. I make the case instead for an interactionist
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Crossing the timescape of the ‘Here and Now’ on Mount Athos Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-29 Michelangelo Paganopoulos
This article focuses on how the monks of Mount Athos embody its unique timescape in their presentation of the monastic self in everyday life, as it emerges out of the musicality of the Athonian landscape. The article unfolds the embodied dialectics in play between the experience of messianic time and its spiritual affordances against which one's bodily resilience is sociomaterially tested in and by
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Reflections on unheroic fieldwork American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-12-27 Meredith G. Marten
More than a decade ago, at the beginning of my doctoral fieldwork, I was kidnapped and robbed one morning in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As I negotiated the logistical and emotional aftermath of this traumatic event, I took refuge in elite, privileged spaces. In doing so, I grappled with difficult problems: my privilege, my fear and feelings of vulnerability, and my broader moral concerns about Tanzania's
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Four alternative currencies and their worlds Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-27 Santiago Mandirola
The following piece is a work of fiction. The trigger for this text was to explore a “what if” question. “What if X happened?” “What scenarios would emerge as a consequence of X?” This premise guided the scenarios presented in this text: what if the movement of every US dollar was made completely traceable? What other currencies, monies, and types of political, social, and economic organization would
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Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. By MelindaCooper. New York: Zone Books. 2024. 564 pp. Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Ilana Gershon
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“What even the cowherds and women know” American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Veena Das
In this commentary I interrogate the implicit picture of anthropological knowledge as vulnerable to errors because its primary scene is taken to be an encounter with an alien society. Using a method of autobiographically inflected ethnographic writing, I ask how the philosophical fantasy of “the logical alien,” which Wittgenstein untangles, finds another version in the anthropologist's imagination
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Cement and displacement American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Kali Rubaii
Displaced people have not escaped war and do not live apart from it. This is evident in the material life of internally displaced Iraqi farmers seeking refuge in a concrete construction site, downstream from a cement‐processing plant in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, one family has repeatedly tried to build a traditional tannour (bread oven) out of unworkable, cement‐infused materials in their environment
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A vicarious scar American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Erin Routon
Difficult challenges are an unavoidable aspect of doing ethnographic fieldwork in sensitive spaces or on sensitive subjects. A less commonly discussed problem, however, is the impact that vicarious or secondary traumas can have on researchers. Here, I discuss my experience of secondary trauma in conducting research with legal advocates in family‐detention facilities in the US. Even in work in which
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Austerity's implications: Parasitism and charity in an English village Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Chima Michael Anyadike‐Danes
English political discourse has long featured accusations of parasitical behavior. In this article, I provide insight into how discussions of parasitism feature in English people's daily lives. Specifically, I discuss how more than a decade of austerity has informed perceptions of parasitical behavior. In exploring this, I make use of more than a dozen months of fieldwork conducted with residents of
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The future of money — seen from above Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Annaliese Milano Merfield
Santiago Mandirola's investment brochure describes a fictional world in which the collapse of the US dollar has transformed the global monetary landscape. This comment analyzes the brochure and its assumptions through the lens of the crypto community. It considers the highly centralized, technocratic vision of monetary governance put forth by the brochure against the crypto community's efforts to build
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Response to comments: “Four alternative currencies and their worlds” Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-24 Santiago Mandirola
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I was wrong about theory American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-12-23 Carole McGranahan
Theory occupies a central, if curious place in contemporary anthropology. It is needed and valuable, enabling the articulation and use of insights from field research. But it is also feared at times as hard, and also used in exclusionary ways. In this commentary, I review how my understanding of and relationship to theory have changed over time, primarily through an understanding of ethnography as
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Elevated Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Aamer Ibraheem
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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Faces from colonial times: the collection of facial casts at the Sapienza University of Rome (Museum of Anthropology "G. Sergi")). Journal of Anthropological Sciences (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Maria Chiara Verducci,Silvia Soncin,Maria Luana Belli,Elisabetta Aloisi Masella,Giacomo Macola,Giorgio Manzi
Founded in 1894, the Museum "G. Sergi" houses a variety of osteological materials and other collections, including several plaster facial casts from different human populations. This paper investigates this collection, which has been acquired (at least in part) in the framework of Italian colonialism, focusing on expeditions respectively led by Lidio Cipriani and Corrado Gini during the fascist regime
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A bio-cultural tale of the past, present and future of human nutrition. Journal of Anthropological Sciences (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Marco Capocasa,Davide Venier
Human nutrition represents a dynamic interplay between biological evolution and cultural development, profoundly shaping dietary practices and health outcomes. This paper traces the dietary evolution of the genus Homo, from practices like foraging, scavenging, hunting, and gathering to the Neolithic transition towards agropastoral subsistence. These changes influenced human biology, evident in genetic
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The New Viking Age: A speculative historical archaeology Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Joanne Baron
Written in response to the Nordic Krone scheme described in Mandirola's (2025) fictional brochure, this essay continues the fiction, presenting a historical and archaeological look back on the Nordic Council 200 years after its formation. In confusing a measure of economic output (e.g. money) with the output itself, the Nordic Council has doomed its society to violence and collapse.
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Ancient numismatists and the seasteading movement Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Scott M. Fitzpatrick
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How Bronze Age Europeans almost got rid of money Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Nicola Ialongo
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Legacies, logics, labors of love: Essays on the economic anthropology of Jane Guyer Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Chelsie Yount, Sibel Kusimba, Caroline Bledsoe, Caitlin Zaloom
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Kin-Work among Black Transit Migrants in Tapachula, Mexico Current Anthropology (IF 2.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-18 Darlène Dubuisson
Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.
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Tumplines, baskets, and heavy burden? Interdisciplinary approach to load carrying in Bronze Age Abu Fatima, Sudan Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-12-17 Jared Carballo-Pérez, Uroš Matić, Rachael Hall, Stuart T. Smith, Sarah A. Schrader
This paper investigates different body techniques for carrying heavy loads by individuals buried at Abu Fatima, a Nubian Bronze Age cemetery in Sudan. Drawing on iconographic evidence from ancient Egypt and Nubia, as well as African and other ethnographic records, the paper aims to understand gendered patterns behind load-carrying practices and their traces on skeletal remains. A multi-proxy approach
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Reconstructing micro-evolutionary dynamics shaping local variation in southern African populations using genomics, metagenomics and personal metadata. Journal of Anthropological Sciences (IF 1.6) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Gonzalo Oteo-García,Giacomo Mutti,Matteo Caldon,Ockie Oosthuitzen,Matteo ManfrediniK,Cristian Capelli
Geography is a well-known factor shaping genetic variation in human populations. However, the potential role played by cultural variables remains much understudied. This study investigates the impact of socio-cultural variables on genomic similarity and the saliva microbiome, using data from populations in Lesotho and Namibia. Geographic distance within Lesotho increases genetic differentiation, while
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Past performance is no guarantee of future results Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-14 Allison Truitt
A response to the promotional pack on Four Alternative Currencies and their Worlds.
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Workers to capitalists: Repositioning Berlin's middle class Economic Anthropology (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-14 Hadas Weiss
In the late 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer studied the then new middle class in Berlin, asking why they were not more disruptive of the structures that bore down on them. I ask the same about insecure professionals in contemporary Berlin, using Kracauer's book Die Angestellten as foil. Kracauer demonstrated that, in the 1920s, they still perceived themselves as workers, albeit white‐collar and salaried
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Where do nomads bury their dead? Necro‐ostracism, statelessness, and the pastoral/ peripatetic divide in Afghanistan Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (IF 1.2) Pub Date : 2024-12-12 Annika Schmeding
This article proposes that stigmas connected to social categories of exclusion prevalent during life extend into dealings with the dead, here referred to as ‘necro‐ostracism’, in the context of death and burial of Muslim nomadic populations in urban Afghanistan. Based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar‐e Sharif, it explores how the unequal status of pastoral and peripatetic