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Gambling, Dignity, and the Narcotic of Time in Tokyo’s Day-Laborer District, San’ya Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Klaus K. Y. Hammering
This article examines the social practice of gambling among stigmatized construction workers in Tokyo’s vanishing day laborer district, San’ya. By considering the abstract temporality of surplus extraction imposed on the manual laborer at the construction site, and the deadening effects of this discipline on his sensorial experience of the world, the article demonstrates how the enactment of masculinity
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From Hoping to Expecting: Cochlear Implantation and Habilitation in India Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Michele Ilana Friedner
While scholars have attended to disability as a new normal that is increasingly present as a category and experience in public spheres, this essay argues that technologies such as cochlear implants and accompanying therapeutics make it possible for children to “become normal.” Parents come to expect, rather than hope, that interventions will work. An analysis of habilitating children with cochlear
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From Desire to Endurance: Hanging on in a Spanish Village Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Hadas Weiss
Comparing a Spanish village in the 1960s and 1980s, Jane Collier analyzed how the different ways of making a living in those decades generated distinct dispositions: from abiding by duty to pursuing desire. I revisited this village to explore the ideological contours of finance-led capitalism and the livelihoods it enables in rural Andalusia. I found that villagers’ struggles to hang on, arrested in
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Mobile Livings: On the Bioeconomies of Mobility Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Marthe Achtnich
This Colloquy brings into conversation two terms critical for an anthropological inquiry into our present condition: mobility and bioeconomy. It moves beyond established accounts of the bioeconomy based on biotechnology and biomedicine to draw attention to the tempo, intensity, and reach of the economization of mobile life across diverse scales and domains. Case studies include emerging forms of surveillance
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EU-Driven Border Control in Niger: From Migrants to Gold, Drugs, and Rare Animals Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Hans Lucht
The Agadez province in northern Niger, a nucleus for trans-Saharan migration to Libya, has in recent years been at the forefront of Europe’s interventions to curb migration movements on the African continent. This essay discusses the transmutations of the cross-border economy in the wake of EU pressure and its implications for local lifeworlds. Trade and smuggling networks have shown resilience and
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The Bioeconomics of Domesticating Zoonoses Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Sarah Green
The majority of diseases that afflict humans are shared by nonhuman animals, and three-quarters of emerging diseases do so. People have known this for centuries, understanding that diseases traveled the same routes as did traders, migrants, and soldiers. Zoonosis is a process that involves the movement of a pathogen from a nonhuman animal body to a human animal body, which then triggers disease. In
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A Wild Boar Chase: Ecology of Harm and Half-Life Politics in Coastal Fukushima Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Ryo Morimoto
This article explores how the Japanese state’s radiation-centered approach to ecological redress in postfallout costal Fukushima impacts a local framework of relationality called en/縁. By ethnographically tracing encounters between humans and wild boars in the region through an ecosemiotic lens, the essay articulates the differences and tensions between en and the model of relationality that the government’s
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Ontological Collateral: The Entanglement of “Cancer Pain” and “Chronic Non-Cancer Pain” in Thailand Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Scott Stonington
Social scientists have long argued that medical objects (categories, bodily processes, and experiences) emerge in historically contingent ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, I describe a special case of this: ontological collateral, the emergence of one medical object due to its entanglement with another. “Cancer pain” recently became a widely accepted category in Thailand to permit
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Bioeconomy and Migrants’ Lives in Libya Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Marthe Achtnich
This essay examines how a bioeconomy might be understood in a context of fragmented state authority in Libya, where mobilities are commodified by different actors, but not always tethered to a state-centric biopolitics of managing migration. It focuses on the unauthorized journeys of migrants moving through Libya and onward by boat to Europe. In this context, economies tapping into human vitality can
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The Bioeconomy and the Birth of a “New Anthropology” Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Ruben Andersson
This concluding reflection of the Colloquy considers how the bioeconomy, as an analytical lens, may cast light on processes of colonization beyond the territorial frame of spatial domination, settlement, and exploitation. Examining the power to colonize with special reference to the politics and policing of migration, it shows how certain migrants have come to serve as a laboratory in the quest to
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A Racial-Religious Imagination: Syriac Christians, Iconic Bodies, and the Sensory Politics of Ethical Difference in the Netherlands Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Sarah Bakker Kellogg
Since 9/11, political debate over immigration in Europe is often posed as a question of Islam’s distance from Europe’s putatively Judeo-Christian ethical tradition—and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. This article interrogates this claim from the perspective of Syriac Orthodox Christians living in the Netherlands, who, despite their conspicuous Christianity, are
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The Multiply Produced Film: Collaboration, Ethnography, and Feminist Epistemology Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Emily Hong
This article introduces the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that highlights the asymmetrical dynamics inherent to collaboration. I draw on (auto)ethnographic material from the making of Get By (2014), a film on worker-community solidarity, to explore collaboration across race, class, and gender in subject matter and method. I situate the multiply produced film within a genealogy
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Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Namita Vijay Dharia
This article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram) in India’s National Capital Region. I link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. In particular, I examine corruption
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The Dying Home: “Bad Deaths” and Spatial Inscriptions of Mourning in a Favela Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Eugênia Motta
In Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, where residents have experienced economic precarity and racialized police violence, “good deaths,” wrought by natural causes and at old age, are distinguished from “bad deaths,” which may take victims’ entire families and houses. This essay chronicles the story of Maria who died at fifty-two, following the death of her youngest son at the hands of the police, and inquires
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The Immune Home: Domestic Enclaves, Diffuse Protections Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Ann H. Kelly,Javier Lezaun
This essay tracks a paradigm shift in the use of chemicals to control malaria: away from insecticidal approaches, focused on killing mosquitoes within private domestic dwellings, and toward the creation of protective communal atmospheres. An ongoing study of the efficacy of spatial repellents to reduce malaria transmission in rural Tanzania provides an opportunity to rethink the oikographic assumptions
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Amazonian House-ing: A Visual Anthropology Essay Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Thiago Da Costa Oliveira,Carlos Fausto
This visual essay documents the house-ing practices of Amazonian river dwellers and urban and peri-urban residents in the face of large-scale development projects. In Altamira (Pará, Brazil), the construction of the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world, the Belo Monte Plant, has led to the flooding of housing areas along rivers and the displacement of residents into collective urban resettlements
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“Masking” Makeup: Cosmetics and Constructions of Race in Rio de Janeiro Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Samuel Elliott Novacich
This article examines applications of bright, eye-catching makeup on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tracking the aesthetic decisions of makeup artists and their clients, I analyze how colorful manipulations of the bodily surface relate to local constructions of race. But the bodily surface does not simply reflect established and conventional understandings of race, nor are the aesthetics
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Home Otherwise: Living Archives and Half-Life Politics in Post-Fallout Coastal Fukushima Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Ryo Morimoto
While the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan forced residents out of their coastal Fukushima homes, transforming familiar ecologies into sites of estrangement, Naoko and neighbors remain invested in the material objects and spiritual relations of their houses, within and despite the logics of contamination. These desires to repair domestic livelihoods to nurture a sense of home (ie) and the idea of dying
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Oikography: Ethnographies of House-ing in Critical Times Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 João Biehl,Federico Neiburg
Houses are at once built shelters; collections of relations, affects, and moralities; and nodes within neighborhoods, communities, and larger political-economic and environmental regimes. This Colloquy proposes oikography as an ethnographic approach that deconstructs technocratic assumptions about the house and traces the plasticity of dwelling across multiple space-times, with a focus on the action
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Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Caroline E. Schuster
Based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which
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Multiscale Home: Shifting Landscapes and Living-in-Movement in Haiti Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Federico Neiburg
In January 2010, a catastrophic earthquake ravaged Haiti. In areas such as Port-au-Prince, the tragedy was compounded by an ensuing cholera outbreak. Here, conditions of prolonged crisis illuminate people’s resilient house-ing responses at the intersection of two dynamics: the vital relational character of Haitian houses and the necessity of mobility for producing new life. Rooted in the Haitian post-plantation
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PROXEMICS, COVID-19, AND THE ETHICS OF CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA. Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 Susan Levine,Lenore Manderson
In South Africa, lockdown and its excesses have opened up questions on the limits of an ethics of care, whose ethics are privileged, how care is delivered, and what care means. We show how an ethics of proxemics and its operationalization as distance highlight everyday inequalities and limit the provision of care. Constraints on physical distancing in line with public health measures intended to limit
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BE KIND: Negotiating Ethical Proximities in Aotearoa/New Zealand during COVID-19. Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 Susanna Trnka
Citizens do not merely respond to states of emergency; in democratic societies, they help constitute them. This essay analyzes New Zealanders' engagements in ethical reasoning during the country's first COVID-19 lockdown. Specifically, I examine how we can understand a variety of public responses to emergency measures-including breaching regulations, threatening rule-breakers, sealing off neighborhoods
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NECROPOLITICS VERSUS BIOPOLITICS: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic. Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 Carolyn M Rouse
Anthropologists have used Michel Foucault's thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. Yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. The arrests, killings of unarmed Blacks by police, COVID-19 racial health inequities, and the January 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that
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THE PANDEMIC IMAGINERIE: Infectious Bodies and Military-Police Theater in Australia. Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 L L Wynn
When pathogens and their movement between people cannot be seen, we imagine them. That imagined menagerie-imaginerie-of infection then becomes associated with marginal others whose bodies and actions become popularly conflated with disease and its transmission. This essay explores how methods of imagining and managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia echoed historical scripts for policing borders
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"L'ENFER, C'EST LES AUTRES": Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID-19. Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 Thomas Strong,Susanna Trnka,L L Wynn
During the COVID-19 emergency, people around the world are debating concepts like physical distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. The ethical significance of proximity-that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (Strathern 2020)-is thus being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships. Through five case studies from Australia, Ireland
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Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Nick Seaver
The people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. Care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care.
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Plants, Pathogens, and the Politics of Care: Xylella fastidiosa and the Intra-active Breakdown of Mallorca’s Almond Ecology Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Emily Reisman
Almonds were once “the gold of Mallorca,” a source of modest wealth and a pillar of diversified farming systems for smallholders on the largest of Spain’s Balearic Islands. Now researchers believe nearly every rainfed almond tree on the island will be dead within as few as five years. The introduced bacteria Xylella fastidiosa, enabled by its spittle-bug vector, and emboldened by climate change, has
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Not Built to Last: Military Occupation and Ruination under Settler Colonialism Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Joseph Weiss
This article explores the afterlife of a military base on the islands of Haida Gwaii, unceded territory of the Indigenous Haida Nation. Canadian Forces Station Masset was officially decommissioned in 1997, its buildings abandoned by Canada’s armed forces. The understanding of both Haida and their settler neighbors was thus that the army was gone, leaving only ruins and ambivalent affects in its wake
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Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Jessica Hardin
Since the 1950s, Samoa has faced rapid changes in food systems and labor practices, creating an environment in which health conditions such as diabetes touch every individual. Through an ethnographic analysis of Samoan people’s attitudes toward the novel food category of vegetables, this article explores how intersecting health promotion and development discourses instrumentalize vegetables as a source
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On Waiting Willfully in Urban Uganda: Toward an Anthropology of Pace Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-08-17 Anna Eisenstein
Women in Uganda strategically time their entry into married motherhood in relation to others with whom they want to be connected. Although much of the burgeoning literature on “waithood” laments global youth’s delayed entry into social adulthood, I show that women in urban Uganda intentionally pause, slowing down their movement through the life course to cultivate networks of interdependence that will
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Becoming-After: The Lives and Politics of Quinine’s Remains Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Townsend Middleton
This article explores the aftermath of quinine in India. Derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria’s only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. But it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. Today, little market exists for Indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the British remain in Darjeeling. What will become of these dilapidated plantations
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The Limits of Corporate Chains and Brand Management: “Loyalty” and the Efficacy of Vernacular Markets in the Andes Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Juliane Müller
This article offers a nuanced ethnographic description of the encounter between multinational corporations and the economic actors who distribute and commercialize their commodities. By analyzing the labor of lower-level employees and the strategies of the middle management of Samsung Electronics Bolivia against traders’ practices and understandings and the vernacular market infrastructure, I offer
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Toward an Affective Sense of Life: Artificial Intelligence, Animacy, and Amusement at a Robot Pet Memorial Service in Japan Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Daniel White,Hirofumi Katsuno
This essay analyzes the organization of Buddhist memorial services for robot pets in Japan against the backdrop of emerging markets for robots equipped with artificial emotional intelligence. It demonstrates how an evocative “sense of life” (seimeikan) becomes both a target of design for robotics engineers and an affective capacity of robot users who care for and through companion robots. Documenting
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Work without Labor: Life in the Surround of a Rural Prison Town Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Heath Pearson
This article challenges the idea that the U.S. prison boom is a federally driven fix. By assembling a two-hundred-year regional history of Cliptown, New Jersey—a rural town with five prisons and three police departments—the article indicates that prisons appear not as an external fix but as the most recent technological iteration of a homegrown system that has always functioned to capture labor through
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Legal Care and Friction in Family Detention Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Erin Routon
The modern instantiation of migrant family detention in the United States has resulted in the creation of carceral spaces in which conflict and care intermingle in everyday encounters. While legal advocates traversing these spaces offer critical aid to the detained, asylum-seeking parents and children confined within, legal advocacy is rarely recognized as caregiving work. Drawing from my ethnographic
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Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Radhika Govindrajan
This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love’s politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India’s central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments
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Vengeful Animals, Involuntary Mourning, and the Ethics of Ndyuka Autonomy Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-09 Stuart Earle Strange
This article reflects on mourning and interspecies responsibility. Considering what Ndyuka Maroons in the Caribbean country of Suriname—historic fugitives from plantation capitalism—call kunu (avenging ghosts) I explore how Ndyukas attempt to secure personal and collective autonomy in an expansively relational reality where mourning is the quintessence of relatedness. Because grief impinges on Ndyuka
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Erratum for “Walk This Way” Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-09 Cultural Anthropology
Meneley, Anne. 2019. “Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine.” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 1: 130–54. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.11. The author would like to make the following correction to the published article: On p. 151, in the references section, the title of the article by Mona Hajjar Halaby has been corrected to “The Proverbial Shatha in Early Twentieth-Century
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Sovereignty in Drag: On Fakes, Foreclosure, and Unbecoming States Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-09 Rebecca Bryant
A growing ethnographic literature demonstrates the mundane practices through which both the state and sovereignty are performed. This article asks at what point such performances succeed or where they may fail, even for those enacting them. The article builds on long-term research in an unrecognized state, the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,” which is often called a pirate or pseudo-state and
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Air Pressure: Temporal Hierarchies in Nepali Aviation Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Tina Harris
While the aviation industry is dominated by narratives of smooth, unending growth and future planning, in practice it is profoundly striated and asymmetrical. Through an ethnographic study of how air traffic controllers, pilots, and operations staff in Nepal experience “air pressure,” this article demonstrates how understandings of the uneven geography of aviation infrastructure are framed in terms
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Banking on Digital Money: Swedish Cashlessness and the Fraying Currency Tether Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Gustav Peebles
As cash has suddenly gone missing from Swedish life, a growing range of citizens and institutions have sounded the alarm that cash enabled a space of egalitarian access now under threat. But because commercial bank currency is gradually displacing public central bank currency, cashlessness in Sweden is not only threatening its egalitarian ethos but also the Swedish Central Bank’s capacity to provide
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Magendo: Arbitrage and Ambiguity on an East African Frontier Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Kevin P. Donovan
This article examines the ambiguities of arbitrage, focusing on illegal coffee trade across the Uganda-Kenya border. I show how residents of the borderlands harnessed ordinary tools (gunny sacks, tin cans, and gravity scales) and cultural repertoires (kinship, language, and ritual) to cultivate and capitalize on difference. They reworked territorial jurisdiction, measurement standards, and surface
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Beyond Compassionate Aid: Precarious Bureaucrats and Dutiful Asylum Seekers in Italy Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2021-02-08 Daniela Giudici
In this article, I track shifting paradigms of refugee management in Italy in times of austerity and welfare state restructuring. Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of asylum-related bureaucratic work in Bologna, the essay explores paradoxical and violent effects of welfare decline both on reception workers’ labor conditions and on the dynamic of aid that they end up providing to asylum seekers. On
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Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-11-05 Malini Sur
This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence
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Underlayers of Citizenship: Queer Objects, Intimate Exposures, and the Rescue Rush in Kenya Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-11-05 George Paul Meiu
In Kenya in recent years, diapers have played a central role in anti-homosexual discourses, suggesting that anal sex results in chronic bodily incontinence. But rumors about adults in diapers do not pertain only to homosexuality. They also describe bodily ruptures resulting from sex work, illicit moneymaking practices, and “immorality,” more generally. This article explores how the resonances between
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Birthing from Within: Nature, Technology, and Self-Making in Silicon Valley Childbearing Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-11-05 Andrea Ford
Through examining childbearing in California’s Silicon Valley, this article describes how seeking “self-actualization” has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. This approach undermines distinctions between “technological” and “natural” approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce “self-knowledge” and enact new
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Animate Earth, Settler Ruins: Mound Landscapes and Decolonial Futures in the Native South Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-11-04 Leigh Bloch
This article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force relations exercised by Indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. I draw on research with members of a community in the U.S. South who claim Muskogee ancestry, visiting ancestral
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Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-03 Andrea Wright
Drawing on ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates and India, this article explores relationships among Indian kinship, gender, and transnational migration through a focus on gold that migrant men buy for their sisters’ or daughters’ weddings. Gold, used as a key component of dowry, is often considered “traditional” in an Indian setting, but is actually shaped by liberalization, contemporary
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Exhuming Dead Persons: Forensic Science and the Making of Post-fascist Publics in Spain Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-03 Jonah S. Rubin
Four decades after the fall of its dictator, Spain still refuses to undertake its legal and moral responsibilities to locate the disappeared. This essay examines how Spanish activists use forensic exhumations to transform the political status of Franco’s victims. Departing from popular and scholarly depictions of forensic science, I show that, in post-fascist Spain, the impact of exhumations has little
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The City Otherwise: The Deferred Emergency of Occupation in Inner-City Johannesburg Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-03 Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon
ABSTRACT This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city unlawful occupations and temporary emergency accommodation sites These are often referred to as ?hijacked buildings,? ?bad buildings,? or ?dark buildings ? However, they are also spaces of refuge, intimacy, and sociality for tens of thousands of South Africans and foreign nationals excluded
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The Right to the Remainder: Gleaning in the Fuel Economies of East Africa’s Northern Corridor Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-03 Amiel Bize
Anthropological Association 2020. Cultural Anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. Reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. Use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes
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The Work of Disaster: Building Back Otherwise in Post-Earthquake Nepal Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-12 Aidan Seale-Feldman
What does a disaster generate? This article brings a critical phenomenological approach into conversation with theories of event to trace the emergence of a mental health crisis and its consequences in Nepal after the 2015 earthquakes. Following the disaster, people who received psychosocial counseling often presented chronic problems that had become visible through the frame of crisis and its ethical
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Structures of Resentment: On Feeling—and Being—Left Behind by Health Care Reform Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-12 Jessica M. Mulligan, Emily K. Brunson
Described by many as an emotional state rooted in having been treated unfairly, resentment has surged over the past decade. Resentment politics troubled the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010) in the United States. While some people gained access to health insurance through the ACA, others experienced continued exclusion from affordable coverage. Drawing on ethnographic
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Masculinity, Migration, and Forced Conscription in the Syrian War Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-12 Kristin V. Monroe
In this essay, I provide a different perspective on the Syrian conflict by examining how the war’s reach can also be located amid the losses, interruptions, and experiences of those Syrians who have until now largely escaped its incredible violence. By looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, I develop an
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The Spy Who Came In from the South Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Darryl Li
Dominant imaginaries of espionage presume that all states surveil their populations but that only the powerful ones can play the “great game” of spying outside their borders. How, then, does a poor postcolonial state spy abroad? Drawing on an ethnography of Arab migrants and jihad fighters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this essay suggests one answer: powerful states have their spies pose as diplomats
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Trust without Confidence: Moving Medicine with Dirty Hands Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Kali Rubaii
As participants in a small trust network smuggle medication across ISIS-controlled northern Iraq to hospitals in the besieged city of Mosul, they theorize their pragmatic entanglements with unknown others. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, as well as the author’s participation in this network, the essay introduces enunciatory trust, or trust without confidence, as an analytical framework
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The Long Turning: A Palestinian Refugee in Belgium Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Diana Allan
This article considers the duration and meaning of insecurity—as it is experienced over the course of a life and moves over borders—through the narrative of a Palestinian woman from Shatila now seeking asylum in Belgium. Structured around one person’s account of the asylum process, it considers what a singular case can reveal about a collective migrant condition, the inconstant line separating secure
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Nested (In)Securities: Commodity and Currency Circuits in an Iran under Sanctions Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Emrah Yıldız
This essay uses a conversation with an Iranian interlocutor to explore the political economy of Iranian sanctions and the creative improvisations they produce on dynamic economic grounds—characterized by an increasingly soft and devaluing national currency, the Iranian rial. It reveals how various (in)securities tied to monetary transactions, particularly those conducted with the “outside world,” come
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Security against the State in Revolutionary Yemen Cultural Anthropology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Ross Porter
This is the final version. Available on open access from the American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology via the DOI in this record