What can we learn about temporality by studying different ways of measuring time, institutional time regimes, and (a)typical experiences and creations of time when growing older? This introduction sets perspectives on this question from the anthropologies of ageing, ethics, and temporality. Understanding humans as time beings, we argue that attention to connections between large‐scale history, collective

In dialogue with the articles in this volume, this afterword takes up the relation between temporality, ageing, and models of the good. In particular, it will consider the diverse models of time that are present in each place studied by the contributors, examining how they shift in relation to one another as people age. I also explore how changes in people's time horizons as they age can shape the

What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics

Against a phenomenological orientation to ageing as path or course, a contrastive frame is offered around a figure termed the enemy. Four distinctive ethnographic fragments are utilized: (1) a Polish‐Jewish migrant to Canada in her late eighties who listens continually to the radio and worries over the malign forces in the world that the radio broadcasts; (2) a Dalit woman in her seventies in a north

Since the early 2000s, the proportion of older adults in Japanese penal institutions has risen dramatically, driven largely by high rates of recidivism. This trend has developed alongside growing social insecurity about crime, as well as anxiety about old age and care in a time of increasing neoliberal discourses of individualized risk and responsibility for maintaining health. This article examines

This article explores transformation as a way of being in the rural Andes. It traces how transformation connects, and produces value within, multiple different spheres of life, specifically agricultural labour, personhood, identity, and space and movement. As an analytical lens, transformation allows us to revise prevailing understandings of how value is attached to agricultural work in these highland

The passage of generational time may be one of the most fundamental ways of experiencing ageing; we age in relation to others with whom our lives are intertwined – by becoming a grandmother or losing a father. Those of the oldest generation weaken and pass away, but in that process, they persist – for a while – with the younger generations. In rural eastern Uganda, old people are ‘still here’ for younger

The anthropology of possibility – and the phenomenological traditions it often draws on – has predominantly been oriented towards the future, the not‐yet. With an empirical point of departure in fieldwork among older Kyrgyz Muslims who become old in the absence of younger relatives and drawing on the critical phenomenology of Alia Al‐Saji, I explore the what‐might‐have‐been as a space of possibility

In the Ik mountains in Uganda, only few old people still have the skills to ‘see time’ with sundials. Common ways of knowing time and age now include phones and ID cards in digital registers. I follow the elder seer Komol to explore how changing the measures of time influences the experience of time and age. How do being a ‘time being’ and ideas about ‘the good life’ change with age, technology, and

The clock‐drawing test, a cognitive screening test widely used clinically, is here taken as a window onto forms of temporality present in clinical encounters involving dementia. Drawing on close reading of clinical notes from their medical records, I offer imagistic silhouettes of three older adults in the Seattle area who had no living spouse or children when they developed dementia. Attending to

Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked

This article offers ‘stages’, an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi‐level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing ‘stages’ as a concept/pun

This article develops a more‐than‐human conception of charisma to explain the interrelated magnetism of palaeontologists and prehistoric megafauna in the United States since the nineteenth century. It extends anthropological analysis of charisma to non‐human bodies, and argues that charisma is created by more‐than‐human processes involving tactile interactions among people and matter within particular

History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Activists fighting evictions in Madrid develop various social, affective, and material connections with and disconnections from their homes. This is especially important for people who are immersed in a regime of economic austerity and neoliberal housing policies that have provoked the social and material unmaking and remaking of homes. These processes take place and are performed through the making

In coastal Bangladesh, ‘affective assemblages of kinship’ produce differential abilities for landless single mothers to migrate to brick kilns, the garment industry, and the Gulf. This group of women who return to their natal homes as a response to violence or abandonment is neglected by anthropologists of kinship and migration. Thinking of assemblages of kinship as open‐ended gatherings enables us

In this article, I examine practices of social detachment among West African migrants in urban Ghana. Faced with pressures arising from expectations of reciprocity, especially from kin back home, some migrants exert considerable efforts to break, if temporarily, with relations of mutual recognition and support, entering what I term migratory aloneness. Far from being an individualizing endeavour linked

This article explores Christian principles, imagery, and ideas shaping the (re)making of masculine ideals, behaviour, and identities among Pentecostal Gitanos in Spain. Scholarship on Pentecostal masculinities emphasizes that in cultural settings dominated by ‘macho’ and other chauvinistic principles, men find it challenging to comply with Pentecostal standards of manhood, and those who do convert

Embedded within Japan's demographic and economic stagnation, traditional craftsmanship unexpectedly aligns with the discourse of creativity. This study delves into the intricacies of this convergence through ethnographic details, shedding light on how endeavours to preserve local crafts intertwine with the burgeoning discourse of creativity within public policy frameworks, thereby shaping a nuanced

In Uganda, the ‘traditional’ wedding, wherein a groom brings money and gifts to his father‐in‐law's home, has long been understood as the ultimate demonstration of a man's social maturity. Yet masculine adulthood is becoming increasingly elusive as weddings become more difficult to afford. Widespread unemployment has rendered most young men unable to fund the rituals while weddings themselves have

This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re‐examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering

Recent studies suggest that race is no longer viewed as a biological category by most anthropologists in the United States, but less empirical work has been carried out in other countries. In this study, we engaged the Polish academic community in anthropology (biological and cultural) and biology by conducting surveys to assess how its members approach and conceptualize race in these disciplines.

This article investigates an increasingly observable yet insufficiently studied phenomenon: the emphasis placed by artists on personal experience as the most legitimate inspiration for art. To this end, I introduce the term ‘sincere realism’ to describe an emerging form of personal cinema in Israel, illustrating how sincerity has evolved into a dominant ‘regime of truth’ that moulds modern forms of

Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam have centred on the relationship between ‘everyday Islam’ and ‘piety’. Some scholars have posited that these are two opposing theoretical poles, while others have described how religion permeates the everyday. I add to these debates by describing how, for one group of young Turkish‐American Muslim women in a piety movement, the everyday permeates religion