What does outer space smell like? On the one hand, space scientists have used scent as a hint to discover the molecular histories of the cosmos. On the other, Palestinian astronomers, who regularly encounter Israel's vertical military arsenal, joke that it smells like Israel. Based on three years of fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, this article follows these astronomers and reveals how colonial

In India and its diaspora in the UK, online activities of various sorts—tweeting, blogging, messaging, trolling, and tagging—have become central to tensions surrounding religion's presence in public life and the stakes of belonging to the nation. Three clusters of social media practices undergird these digital mediations: piety, surveillance, and fun. Such practices reveal how internet-enabled mediations

In the shari‘a seminaries (hawza) of South Beirut, young Shi‘i Muslims articulate a notion of ethics that is realized in and through collective life. Classes on ethics (akhlaq) help them reweave the moral fabric of their neighborhoods by addressing volatile public situations, correcting improper conduct, and emulating virtuous figures. The concerns that animate these classes, and the practices of caretaking

The war in Ukraine has uprooted millions of people, forcing them to confront their habitual material environment of home and everyday life in new and unexpected ways. This is particularly the case when they evacuate and must decide what to take with them and what to leave behind. This photo-essay comprises a selection of objects that, at the moment of crisis, have stepped in to embody important aspects

In 2015, during the cease-fire in Ukraine, Misha, a Cossack, a veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya, and a “volunteer” in the ongoing war, waited impatiently to be called back to the front, smoking in his truck parked across from his apartment in St. Petersburg. Misha's commitment to a life of combat is an invitation to think of war not as an interruption of ordinary life but as an ongoing, corroding

Russia's attempted occupation of Ukraine informs a concept of de-occupation in an age of 21st-century planetary wars. The tide of war crimes committed in Ukraine is beyond dispute, having been identified by legal scholars as genocidal attempts to condemn the very foundations of livelihood. I discuss the precedents that have allowed such crimes to occur and describe how Ukrainians are trying to counter

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world's largest humanitarian aid agencies were largely nowhere to be seen. In their absence, tens of thousands of volunteers from Ukraine, Poland, and further abroad helped the more than 16 million displaced and war-affected Ukrainians. This massive volunteer response represents a case of “distributed humanitarianism,” a post-Fordist form of humanitarian aid

Human-to-insect comparisons turn the stomachs of scholars of language and discrimination, but do they incite violence? In the spring of 2014, some Ukrainians referred to people they suspected of separatist sympathies as kolorady, or Colorado potato beetles, a notorious invasive pest. But kolorad was also a response to a pro-Russian epithet for Ukrainians: fashist (fascist). This article traces the

“Aid dependency” has long been a concern among development organizations, because it supposedly discourages the entrepreneurial spirit and thus hinders economic development. But what happens when beneficiaries refuse aid? In this article, I offer an ethnographic account of aid refusal in postconflict northern Uganda. There, members of savings and loan associations negotiate debts and investments through

The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to “do” the 96-km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda—denoting both the track and the place where the

The idea of “species” is the main unit for representing ecological relations. But what would an ecology look like if we started by tracing its relations from below the species threshold? By deploying an infraspecies ethnography, I show how, in suburban Barcelona, human and wild boar individuals relate in personal, creative ways, and how in doing so, they also reshape their quotidian ecologies from

In 2018, an unprecedented red tide prompted Chile's Ministry of Health to close fisheries throughout the country's southern Aysén Region. The disaster heightened the precarity of “paper fishers,” or those who seldom fish but deftly navigate Chile's neoliberal fisheries management system. Amid the crisis, these fishers performed valuable distributive labor. They connected benefits from transferable

Scholars have theorized the use of chance processes in modern art in general, and in computer-based art in particular, as the expression of an aesthetics of nonintention and authorial abnegation. Although writers of computer-generated poetry in the United States make extensive use of computer-based randomization, their creative adventures with computational indeterminacy do not lead them to endorse

Against what they considered the immoral politics of sectarianism, leading activists in Lebanon in the 2010s combined entrepreneurialism and activism to animate systemic change and build an effective nation-state. In doing so, they created an ethicopolitical subjectivity that I call entrepreneurial activism. Entrepreneurial activists articulated an ethical politics that celebrated patriotic citizens

In South Lebanon, war is lived as landscape, environment, milieu. Those pursuing life in such quarters do what they can to make-live, and their lifelines are often as vitalizing as they are deadly: tobacco farmers ally themselves with what they call a “bitter crop” that flourishes in an arid war zone, while pastoralists walk in explosive fields with their mine-evading goats. These multispecies alliances

The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted work patterns in academia. There is mounting evidence that men's publishing productivity increased while women's decreased. Yet most studies of this phenomenon have analyzed authorship and peer review data separately, without considering their interrelationship. We conceptualize authorship and peer review together as visible and invisible forms of labor, a lens

The expansion of gold mining in West Africa transforms miners’ relations to space and time as they move frequently from one mining site to the next. Whereas labor, reproduction, and social integration are expected to be durably organized through the social institutions of marriage, mentorship, and friendship, itinerant miners recast these institutions in a compressed and nonbinding form. As evictions

Since the 1990s, commercial sites across Asia and the Middle East have seen an uptick in visits from Nigerian importers, tens of thousands of whom are now passing through every year. In this context, in which circulatory South–South migration has intensified and transnational commercial links have strengthened, Nigerian mass commercial markets have remained strikingly resistant to monopolies. This

Opioid agonist medications, such as the buprenorphine-based Suboxone, are becoming increasingly important tools for caring for people with opioid use disorders. Yet, whether at the level of the family, the clinic, or pharmaceutical companies, the circulation of Suboxone can involve forms of concealment, secrecy, and deceit, even as it is used to provide a vital form of care. In exploring the moral

Capture-recapture, a method devised for estimating wildlife population sizes using technologies like bird banding, has been repurposed for use with “rare and elusive” human populations. Capture-recapture is implemented to count “key populations,” groups that constitute a small portion of the general population but are at high risk of HIV infection, including men who have sex with men. Drawing on ethnographic

Can stateless persons become legal-economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia-based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals—biometric data, genealogy

Since the 1990s, training programs for service-sector jobs have proliferated in India. Frequently referred to as “skills training,” these programs aim to overcome the perceived cultural and professional “deficiencies” of youth from the poorest sections of society. They focus on “soft skills” and “personality development,” teaching body etiquette, time discipline, and emotional control; introducing

Since the 1980s, anthropologists have criticized a US-centric view of bioethics that presents individual autonomy as a universal principle without acknowledging its embeddedness in time and place. A recent turn in this critique points out how this view has gained dominance across the world, traveling alongside clinical trials and global health interventions. Here, centering a competing bioethical vision

In the Guyanese Amazon, Waiwai memory is made through the substances and associated sentiments that accrue in the body. Remembering and forgetting are morally weighted actions that transform the dispositions of others, enabling desired feelings of contentment or anger and ill will. Waiwai perspectives on the stakes of being or not being in the thoughts of others matter for their relations with the

Since the 1990s, Thamel—a dense neighborhood in Kathmandu, Nepal—has become the primary hub of transgressive, experimental cultural practice among young urban Nepalis. The multivalent assemblage of Thamel reflects emergent lifeworlds that challenge “traditional” conceptions of Nepali identity, and the place produces those emergent lifeworlds as well. Such transformations contest normative social roles

To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. But it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory but an acknowledgment of

In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of care and labor. Today, the growing popularity of fitness is complicating the cultural politics of bodily substances, especially sweat. Challenging ideals of feminine propriety, new ways of sweating are fostering health-conscious subjectivities and encouraging alternative ways of becoming and relating. As

In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such “drum breach” accidents have been characterized in official reports as “isolated events,” and as “self-initiated” and “spontaneous

In Indonesian Islamic boarding schools (pesantren), access to digital media is strictly regulated, if allowed at all. Young women students are viewed as particularly susceptible to the perceived moral dangers of uncensored internet content and the unmonitored communication of social media and cell phones. At the same time, digital literacy is seen as integral to social advancement and higher education

The site of Douglas Taylor's landmark study of Garifuna language and culture, Hopkins, Belize, occupies a prominent place in the cultural anthropology of Central America. Over 70 years, this Afro-Caribbean community has been visited by a series of ethnographers whose synchronic “snapshots” have proved short-lived. In 1971 the first anthropologist to return described emerging livelihoods that defied

In South Africa the racialized contours of economic life powerfully shape the distribution of who owns poultry enterprises, who is employed to labor in them, who consumes poultry products, and in which way. When, in late 2017, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) decimated the South African poultry sector, it revealed the ontological transformations of industrial egg-laying poultry

In disputes between Palestinian landowners and the Israeli state, several Palestinian surveyors in the West Bank use Ottoman-era deeds to establish preinvasion land claims. Through a distinct practice of counter-forensics, these surveyors transform landscapes, documents, and local knowledge into evidence of property ownership. They seek to establish the fact of Palestinian ownership before Israeli

As youth from the Levantine diasporas resettle in what is nominally their homeland, they compose narratives of home at the intersection of finding their place and the constant movement of their existence. Their homemaking efforts delineate places of belonging where these youth position themselves in a double relative location: the intersubjective (in relation to others) and the subjective (in relation

Both music and love are conspicuously absent from the public soundscapes of Hargeysa, Somaliland. But behind closed doors, people listen to love songs. In doing so, these lonely love sufferers and love hopefuls make sense of various challenges. Using accounts from a cross section of Somalilanders, I show that these solitary listening practices open into uniquely intimate and transformative opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered our associational life and relationship to public space, revealing deadly inequities in access to health care and other resources, particularly in communities of color. In Harlem and other areas of New York City that are experiencing neoliberal redevelopment, the response to the pandemic has also rearticulated public spaces, introducing new and diverse

Death—the image of the skeleton—has long been the symbol of a strong Mexican state. But, like most symbols, it has many faces. Nowhere is this more evident than in Oaxaca, where tourists flock to attend joyful Day of the Dead celebrations while the cult to La Santa Muerte, a sanctified death, is growing strong. Through the ethnographic lens of this image, I approach other representations of the slain

The question whether Europe's Christian churches and monasteries are “religious” or “secular” distracts us from something far more significant: Europe's historical participation in systems of enslavement and expropriation. While these solid buildings seem to demand that we pay attention to them in their “density,” such a focus overlooks their role in reaffirming the boundaries and morality of the dominant

As humanity struggles with the onslaught of climate change and our uncertain future, we find ourselves facing the same kinds of resource challenges that island populations have known for centuries. In the case of postsettler societies, responsible environmental stewardship must engage with Indigenous understandings of knowledge and the world. I make this argument by critiquing Bourdieu's theory of

Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities

In the Netherlands young Muslim women have increasingly begun to join women-only kickboxing gyms. Dutch public discourse has taken notice, treating this phenomenon as a surprising development. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women's sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment; Muslim women's participation thus exemplifies the incongruence

As declarations of a possible “end of AIDS” emerged during the epidemic's fourth decade, some HIV-prevention efforts shifted to address social conditions and individual dispositions among the populations most affected. In Peru, where HIV was concentrated among transgender women and gay men, health science positioned transactional sex as one site of intervention. Gay and transgender communities themselves

Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler-colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such “foreign labor” as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses

Mumbai's dumping grounds, located on the city's estuarine edge, are sites where garbage and marsh are turned into salable land. This process of translating waste into land depends on keeping matter, beings, and landscapes separate and on limiting their interactions. Yet waste and the marsh interact and transform in ways that escape managerial discourse, revealing a haze of category and control errors

For Iraqi refugees in Cairo, third-country resettlement offers a possible alternative to conditions of exile that they describe as “living in transit.” Yet resettlement—in which refugees are “selected and transferred” by a third country that offers them residence and, usually, citizenship—is available to less than 1 percent of refugees. A scholarly focus on already-resettled refugees obscures the resettlement

How are disasters made into routine, even banal parts of everyday life? In Mexico City the spatiality and temporality of disasters have become an object of dynamic governmental manipulation. The city's water engineers use a vast drainage tunnel system to strategically transform what would otherwise be catastrophic flooding of the city center into a slow-moving, spatially diffuse, and ultimately routine

By compiling official paperwork, bureaucrats in institutional settings effectively make their clients into the particular “types” of subjects best suited to preestablished institutional interventions. The efficacy of such paperwork stems from bureaucrats’ unspoken—and perhaps unacknowledged—belief in sympathetic magic, or a person's ability to transform another person or object by working on a representation

What do people rendered expendable through biopolitical categories do to survive them? When governments classify types of work according to ideologies of essentiality and excess, such as in response to crisis, they construct biopolitical categories that render some livelihoods untenable. Such a politics interacts with existing terrains of inequitable citizenship, pushing some to what feels like the

Street cultures remain a challenging topic for anthropological analysis, reflecting broader disciplinary tensions. Approaches that focus on structure and power tend to provide overly deterministic accounts of action, especially regarding violence, while attempts to trace ethical striving have tended to characterize street cultures as domains of ethical failure or as defined by the pursuit of short-term

After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan's military government unleashed a program of extrajudicial detentions to surveil and track down “Islamic terrorists.” These men are known as the “missing” or “disappeared” persons in the movement mobilized by their families to protest the abductions. Ethnographic research with the families of “missing persons” in Pakistan, however, involves working with people whom

The Angolan village of Cusseque, established during the country's civil war, lost its military purpose when the conflict ended in 2002. The village's neighbors assumed that Cusseque's remaining residents would leave; most stayed. They have since fought to legitimize their presence. Fieldwork with Cusseque residents helps illuminate why they assert their merging with the land—a merging that I call bodyland—through