Africanist anthropology has tended to paint social relations on the continent in a positive light, giving the impression that a pro-social relationality will provide the poor with economic assistance in moments of need. This article troubles these accounts by turning to Kenya, where a history of socioeconomic stratification has created a landscape of class closure. Rather than generously give, upwardly

I consider the influence of the language used in anthropological analysis (the metalanguage). If in principle there are at least as many anthropologies as there are languages, then we must allow the possibility of seven thousand or so more or less incommensurable anthropologies. However, incommensurability need not follow: not only can sparse theory aid comparison but it can also help establish partial

The idea of ‘equity’, largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province

The tech startup is a globally admired and emulated form of enterprise, celebrated for its capacity to turn lines of digital code into lean and lucrative businesses. Drawing on recent work in the anthropology of money, I argue that the tech startup's rise is not only leading people to pursue new ways of making money but also giving rise to new constructions of the character and value of money itself

The remains of Amani, a century-old scientific laboratory in Tanzania, are quintessential modern relics. When anthropologists turn to such infrastructures of, originally colonial, knowledge-making, their own implication with the object of their study – and with its epistemological and political-economic origins and order – becomes part of the ethnographic pursuit. This entanglement between researcher

This volume follows failures out into the world, exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives, and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted – unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate, and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode

This essay examines the generative effects of claiming moral failure within a Ukrainian liberal movement for media reform in post-Maidan, pre-invasion Ukraine. The reformers wished to reorganize news reporting around the ideals of autonomy, balanced objectivity, impartiality, and corrigibility, which they believed underpinned Western media. They decried most Ukrainian media as failing such standards

What might it mean to follow failure ‘out into the world’ (Alexander, introduction to this volume) in a way that is attentive both to its contingent and diffuse effects, and to the work involved in making it socially legible? This essay follows a moment of social breakdown, its reverberations in social life, and the forms of diagnosis it elicited as a way of exploring the double social life of failure

The Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 is popularly associated with a litany of failures: political, structural, moral, material. But while the official inquiry has sought to frame the fire as a discrete event, for local residents it is inextricable from accumulated histories of injustice and inequality. Years on, the fire still reverberates, its afterlife constellating with new narratives and politics

Tracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re-evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how this vast enterprise, dogged by failure, endures, I suggest that different ontological narratives re-orientate the enterprise both temporally and vis-à-vis

In conditions of post-welfare, failure takes a variety of forms. I offer an auto-ethnographic account of state-funded caregiving for people diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities in New York State, where both caregiver labour and its management have been subjected to greater discipline as post-welfare initiatives seek to re-educate recipients of benefits and careworkers to be simultaneously

What is deemed possible in the wake of failure? The global biotech industry's failure to develop affordable diagnostic devices for use in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has inspired a generation of humanitarian entrepreneurs to launch their own diagnostic start-up companies. This essay traces the rise and fall of one such start-up in Boston in the United States, Daktari, which developed a

This article considers how the Christian obedience of male prisoners inside the ‘faith dorm’ of a maximum-security prison in the US state of Alabama overlaps with penal compliance. I argue that prisoners’ devotion to faith-dorm strictures is not straightforward rule-following but forges social and Christly intimacy. Faith-dorm obedience foregrounds the theological, and it reveals non-church institutional

In this article, I describe a case in which a mother and her son, while discussing what they perceive to be the purpose of the Argentinian conditional cash transfer programme known as the ‘Universal Child Allowance for Social Protection’, also project different economic returns for the son's future. The decisions they make contradict the ultimate purpose of this policy: to accumulate human capital

This article critically explores the complex and contradictory meanings attached to conspicuous consumption in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It examines why un(der)employed young people, especially young Black men, view the trappings of wealth in their midst and dismiss them as ‘fake’. The article shows how the widespread concern with ‘faking it’ indexes the unstable links

This article explores the elaboration and application of the Old Testament idea of ‘covenant’ among Zambian church leaders who are Christian nationalist activists. In this framework, Zambia serves as an analogue of biblical Israel, while contemporary government and church leaders are the analogues of Old Testament kings, priests, and prophets. This covenantal approach presents challenges. On the one

This article draws on Islamic perspectives that conceive of visions (ru'yā) and nightmares (kābūs) as instances whereby Jamilā, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee girl in Brooklyn, New York, imagines and makes sense of the dead. She uses the Arabic words ma‘rwf (familiar) and gharīb (strange) to describe her dead elderly neighbour, Safiyya, in her visions and nightmares. Jamilā’s familiar-strange experiences

Mitigating climate change requires us to constrain combustion in a double sense: decreasing both the use of fossil fuels and the flammability of the biosphere. Fire management by Indigenous peoples in Australia's northern savannas has been presented as a solution to offset the former and assist with the latter, leading to the foundation of a regional economy of projects generating ‘premium’ carbon

The Somali people have suffered from a devastating civil war and large-scale forced displacement since the late 1980s. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Northwest London Somalis during the khat (Catha edulis) control debates that led to the prohibition of the substance in June 2014. It argues that diaspora poetics can become an expression of a deeply divisive past offering ways to

Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or ‘taboos’. In modern large-scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accidents and assault. These responses may seem both disparate

‘Insight’ or vipassanā meditation refers to meditative practices employed within Buddhist traditions. But following the secularization of vipassanā in recent decades – that is, its differentiation from Buddhism – orthodox Jewish Israeli meditators frame it as a religiously neutral, therapeutic technique centred on the mundane human body. They thus consider it as involving no forbidden ‘Eastern’ religious

This ethnography of a charismatic group in French Polynesia aims to shed light on the patterns of authority and commitment within such informal religious spaces connected to the global economy of charismatism. Through analysis of the personal itineraries of several members of ‘Jean's group’ and through the observation of a march organized by the group in question in January 2012, I question the apparent

Exotic goods belong to a class of valuable materials that have played an important role in ritual activities, political ceremonies, and economic agreements in different human contexts, both past and present. However, we have made little progress in understanding exchanges as relationships between donors and receivers, as forms of reciprocal interaction that forged a network of links between individuals

Certain culinary practices are often interpreted as evidence of ‘economizing’ (a frugal use of available resources) or of ‘excess’ (a celebratory expenditure of resources for symbolic purposes). This article uses these categories as a way to interrogate analytical assumptions about materialism more generally. Drawing on ethnographic research from both rural Tanzania, and the contemporary suburban United

This article examines claims of ownership and appropriation of Basotho blankets. Ingrained in the ritual and mundane reproduction of life among the Basotho people of Lesotho, the luminous blankets and their story have enticed many to deal in them. The blankets are manufactured and trademarked by Aranda Textile Mills, and in recent years they have been adapted by Basotho fashion designers, foreign private

This article builds upon Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial Northwestern European skilled modes of engaging with wild fish. It explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be

Norway's welfare system is widely admired for its success in mitigating the worst effects of post-industrial capitalism. In the past decade, however, that system has undergone remarkable – and controversial – change, as commercial firms have been permitted to play a growing role in administering services for the unemployed. This article, based on fieldwork in Oslo during the 2015-16 oil crisis, examines

For Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to ‘liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things’. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human ‘no longer offers itself to our powers’: to go beyond the category-thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes – Self, Society, Culture, Nature – into question. The ‘liberation’ of human

This article examines practices of critique and ambivalence among participants in a controversial Latin American investment scheme called the telares de la abundancia (‘looms of abundance’). While the dominant discourses about the telares construe them as predatory, participants understand themselves as knowing subjects who reject a worldview based on economic rationality and utility in favour of one

NGOs often portray commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, transgender people (hijrae), and homosexual men as quasi-legal persons who are locked in a policing-criminality relationship with the state, and who therefore need them to mediate this relationship. By advancing such portrayals, NGOs in Pakistan's HIV prevention sector capitalize upon the presumed cultural difference of the so-called

This article examines the mysterious side of ‘company’, a fundamental aspect of human existence, exemplifying it with an ethnographic vignette about a dugout canoe in the mangroves of southern Bahia (Northeast Brazil). Inspired by Kant's proposal concerning aspects of world, the article distinguishes company both from empathy and from community, as distinct registers of human sociality. Being in company

As part of a surge in technologies with so-called ‘artificial emotional intelligence’, robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors’ feelings. For this reason, it can be called a ‘technology of affect’. In order to communicate how new affective

The King of Bangkok (Sopranzetti, Fabbri & Natalucci 2021) is a non-fictional graphic novel, based on more than a decade of anthropological research and an attempt to think graphically through ethnography and think ethnographically through comics. The book, which was first published in Italian, then in Thai, and finally in English, tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets

Anthropological studies of the internet have traced the emergence of new forms of intimacy in various arenas of life, including friendship. Drawing upon an ethnography of Facebook and its use among young lower-middle-class men in Pune, Maharashtra, western India, the article investigates the discourse of friendship young men deploy on the platform. Although moulded in the image of their intimate friendships

Those giving care to people with intellectual disabilities in the United Kingdom are obliged to drive bad forms of intimacy, such as abuse, out of the caring relationship. They must also enable these individuals to find positive forms of intimacy through reciprocal relationships such as friendships. These two aims are normally separated, but in an organization called L'Arche UK, they are combined in

From the perspective of a legal aid clinic that works with foreign workers in Mae Sot, Thailand, this article explores how the project of extending legal rights to migrants is structured by tensions between the ideals of translation – what translation should be, who ought to conduct it, and how its efficacy might be imagined – and the various ways in which translation actually occurs. Analysis of these

This article argues that a population of relatively affluent retired people in a small Irish town have employed the possibilities of grandparenting to resolve many of the tensions of contemporary kinship. This includes the tension between the obligations of prescriptive relationships as against the voluntarism of friendship. This is considered against a background shift in kinship studies towards a

This article uses reflections on chronopolitical praxis during the period 2006-19 in Bolivia in order to make a more general contribution to the anthropology of time and temporalities. The article proposes the theoretical concept of ‘timerendering’ in order to examine the ways in which time emerged as a pervasive register that mediated and also deepened political, social, and ethnic conflict in Bolivia

The article examines the process of production and change of place names based on data collected in 2017 among the Okhotsk Ewenki, the easternmost Indigenous community in Siberia, Russia. Through ethnographic and semiotic analysis, we show that Ewenki place names are not simply reproduced, but rather generated and transformed through empathic contact and engagement within a semiotic circle of shared

The non-existence of corporate lineages among Indigenous peoples in lowland South America has been widely accepted since the 1970s. There has, however, yet to be adequate resolution of the question of what are the social formations formerly called ‘lineages’. In this article, I re-examine previous characterizations of A'uwẽ (Xavante) social organization to propose that what were identified as lineages

While there is a growing anthropological interest in professionals as experts and powerful actors, there is little ethnographic inquiry into invocations of professionalism by less privileged communities. This article examines how professionalism in Lebanon was increasingly appropriated by low-income communities in ways not referring to any particular profession or occupational domain. As a locally

Inspired by the fertility and climate change-mitigation properties of the so-called Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs), soil science has devised a technoscientific replica, a soil amendment known as biochar, intended to improve agricultural sustainability and carbon storage in the biosphere. Drawing on fieldwork with Afroindigenous horticulturalists, this article shows, however, that the activation of these

Dating to the pre-Hispanic era, carved stone sculptures of terraced landforms – maquetas – found in the south-central Andes evoke topographic models. The purpose of these maquetas has eluded archaeologists as the lithic landscapes do not correspond precisely to the terrain and could not have served as maps. By centring irrigation as a fundamental concern among communities of the semi-arid western cordillera

Manifestation is a spiritual practice with material gains. It is a way for those involved with spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, to make money as required while maintaining a level of consonance between their economic life and spiritual path. Analysing the entwinement of economics and religion in everyday life, this article contributes to literature on spiritual economies and, more broadly, to the anthropology

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members

In Denktagebuch (Thought diary, 1950-73), Hannah Arendt wrote that acts which cannot be forgiven are beyond punishment and hence cannot be reconciled to. In this essay, I draw from Arendt to further theorize and extend the concept of irreconciliation. I draw together ethnographic material, historical material, documents, media reports, and reviews during this era of irreconcilability which includes

Debates over reconciliation, atonement, forgiveness, and forgetting involve political and personal elements, with substantial investments and commitments. I contrast two perspectives: one stresses unconditional forgiveness independent of atonement; the other reflects on the importance of moral responsibility for the formation of the person. Being held accountable, for Ricoeur, matters for the development

Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through

Most post-conflict reconciliatory exercises make it incumbent upon survivors to forgive, and seek closure as a demonstration of ‘moving on’. Various anthropologists have criticized reconciliation and related forms of ‘alternative justice’ extensively but within the framework of maintaining social bonds and the rule of law. In this introduction, I reflect critically on the interdisciplinary scholarship

This essay investigates transnational human rights activist networks seeking justice for war crimes committed during the Bangladesh War of 1971, especially in light of the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on activists in London, it demonstrates the need to engage with transitional justice initiatives discursively and ethnographically in order to avoid losing sight of the

In Argentina, irreconciliation is created through everyday practices of vigilance against closure and collective struggles against impunity. In this essay, I show how over several decades since the fall of the dictatorial regime (1976-83), human rights activists and laypeople have devised ways to keep the past alive while attending to injustices through embodied collective engagements with the country's

Contemporary justice-making processes often focus on reconciliation or legal retribution, but not on the complexity of victimhood beyond individual subjectivity or refusals of state propositions for social repair. In Colombia, where drug cartels and state-sponsored violence had terrorized the population for over fifty years, it was not forgiveness and acceptance that punctuated the turn of the twenty-first

This essay examines the political uses of photography in the protests of the Tamil families of the disappeared in northern Sri Lanka. Enforced disappearances have long featured as an instrument of state terror. Their lingering effects have been noted as a significant challenge to transitional justice processes in the aftermath of the island's civil war. By examining how protesters make their political

The influence of institutional mandates on knowledge can be seen particularly clearly in the preferences and absences of truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) proceedings. A recent trend in TRCs involves a shift away from the exercise of judicial powers and the quest for justice and towards more concern with affirming the experience of victims or ‘Survivors’. Canada's TRC on Indian Residential

‘Dealing with ambiguity’ has become a pressing concern in many spheres of contemporary life, often presented as a ‘survival skill’ in an uncertain world. Working with ambiguity also plays a crucial role in the musical pedagogy of the Ottoman-Turkish ney (Sufi reed flute), the playing of which I discuss in this article. Rather than a constraint or deficiency to be resolved, in the context of ney apprenticeship

World-wide, diabetes is taking on epidemic proportions. This is a debilitating disease that damages and destroys bodily systems unless blood sugar levels are kept close to normal, and patients are therefore urged to practise attentive self-management. Among people with type II diabetes in Vietnam, such everyday attentiveness seems to far exceed clinical recommendations, suffusing daily lives in pervasive

Among producers of Shi‘i Islamic media in Pakistan, the quality of being live as an atmosphere capable of mediation has gained efficacy along with changes in media for religious dispensation. Central to the importance of live recordings are the ways they are perceived to most effectively mediate the ethical, ritual, and transhistorical contours of azadari, a word that describes the ways in which the

Doing research on fishery commodities in Portugal led us to an enigma: for a dead fish to be fresco (fresh) it must be alive. This paradox manifests at a popular, commercial, and legal level. It denotes the interruption of the difference between being dead and being alive in the commodity form. In Portugal, we suggest, the commercialization of peixe fresco (fresh fish) is based on the production and