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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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This colloquy takes the Middle East region as a starting point from which to explore a contrapuntal concept of security that is subverted from its original meaning and captured from the state. The essays follow the lives of revolutionary youth, doctors, commodity traders, refugees, and spies to examine their experiences of (in)security. In doing so, the essays deploy storytelling and other ethnographic

By considering how Ghanaian activists and artists engage with different forms of cynicism in their attempts to fight corruption, this article reflects on two kinds of activist orientations: one located in future-oriented projects of political change, and another embracing contradiction by poking fun at the duplicity of politics. I argue that while the cynicism of other middle-class Ghanaians served

This article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the Civilizations Choir of Antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of Turkey’s democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir’s hometown, Antakya, near Turkey’s border with Syria, I compare the

This article introduces an autobiographical analytical tool that aims to elucidate the complexity and interweaving of opposing ideological positions as these emerge in the field and while writing ethnography. The technique introduced makes visible the split of the author’s identity into two: between that of a hard and a soft Marxist, where each authorial self resonates with a particular local perspective

The Colombian government and large-scale mining companies accuse small-scale gold miners of lacking a sense of the future, thereby harming the future of Colombia. In this article, I argue that marginalized people who extract gold with small-scale techniques create an alternative sense of future by engaging with the leftovers of their gold mining practices. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork

This collection of essays offers an exploration of care as a gesture of recognition. As both object of inquiry and ethnographic representation, care is examined as the work of discerning and representing traces. The introduction and subsequent essays grapple with the work of writing about absent others, and how the anthropological endeavor might itself be considered a form of care.

This essay examines mourning and the possibilities for open grief among veterans, asking how the traces of what has been lost persist into the present in ways that find no easy resolution. It questions the normative value of an end to mourning, proposing instead that grief—and indeed our anthropological formulations of the meaning of such affects and events—might be held open, trace and memory maintained

Military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. In communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans

In Colombia’s attempts to bring its decades-long conflict to a close, the state engaged in a broad endeavor to bring about a new era: the “post-conflict.” Land restitution, which aims to return and title land to those who lost it in the conflict, was billed as part of the path to peace. In the shadow of the post-conflict, however, restitution has given rise to speculation on uncertain market and legal

At First Steps, a small private adoption agency outside Chicago, social workers spent more time processing paperwork than interacting with clients. In addition to mediating the relationship between individuals and the bureaucratic adoption apparatus, these documents created anticipatory (p)re-kinned subjectivities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2009 and 2016, this article examines

In this article, I explore the ways in which political subjectivities take shape through populist mobilization and dissipation. While the rise and increasing electoral success of populist movements across the world are largely attributed to charismatic leadership that conjures the will of “the people,” much less known is how people become populist subjects at a particular historical juncture. By attending

Long-accepted models of causality cast diseases into the binary of either “contagious” or “non-communicable,” typically with institutional resources focused primarily on interrupting infectious disease transmission. But in southern Belize, as in much of the world today, epidemic diabetes has become a leading cause of death and a notorious contributor to organ failure and amputated limbs. This ethnographic

In the world of global politics, talk is cheap. States sign negotiated agreements, but a treaty without an enforcement mechanism is considered weak, because states are not expected to adhere to commitments whose materiality is merely that of ink and paper. To verify the terms of state commitments to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 1970, International

This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants

In a Turkish delta, fishers, scientists, and residents articulate contrasting moral ecologies of infrastructure. Contesting the infrastructural remaking of delta environments, fishermen connect ecological change to the concerns of working-class livelihoods; scientists assert a unique moral authority to create new habitats for selected species; and activists couch claims of ecological justice within

For the past thirty years, the Brazilian government has recognized dozens of sites and cultural practices of Afro-descendant groups as national heritage, including the historical maroon site Quilombo dos Palmares. As this site has gained international notoriety, academic research has focused on the value of this historical landmark for commemorating Afro-Brazilian heritage. This article looks to the

The Egyptian government has long subsidized bread as part of its program of social support. Most Egyptians eat this subsidized bread, known as baladi bread, daily. We examine everyday practices of handling baladi bread as casual care. Scholarship on care has drawn attention to the multiple ways in which care can be practiced around a range of human and nonhuman others. Casual care signals a mode of

This article considers how Christianity contributes to the appearance of cognitive disability in Uganda, a country with some of the most progressive disability policies in the world but little in the way of formal care and advocacy for cognitively disabled people. As a point of departure, the article invokes Hannah Arendt’s notion of appearance as a way to thematize the importance of public display

Recent theorizations of animation offer intriguing possibilities for recognizing and attending to the sociality of a range of entities, including the dead. Today, diverse digital media are being used to maintain and even deepen intimate relationships with deceased loved ones. These media bring the dead to presence through forms of animation, understood not only in the narrow technical sense as a media

Demographic and policy changes in Japan during the first decades of the twenty-first century have resulted in significantly more people growing older and dying alone, especially in densely populated urban centers. As the national Long-Term Care Insurance system continues to promote community-based elder care despite weakened family and neighborhood bonds, the home has become an intensified space of

Descending on the capital city of Freetown a decade after Sierra Leone’s civil war, members of the Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional Healers Union (SLITHU) unearthed countless “witch guns,” apprehended dozens of malevolent witches, and endeavored to rehabilitate culprits as productive citizen herbalists. The organization’s leader, President Field Marshal Alhaji Dr. Sulaiman Kabba, described these

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia, this article puts forth the concept of imaginal caring to examine a form of caring that is fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual. To develop this concept, I take the vantage point of young children (ages eight through twelve) who lived in households with persons who were suffering from tuberculosis and HIV. The children were involved in providing

The articles in this issue of Buildings & Landscapes speak to topics, themes, and subjects that students of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes hold dear. Our authors examine connections between vernacular architectures of place and migration and the ties of vernacular architecture to the role we play in both interpreting and preserving local monuments. They add to our knowledge of topics

In 2017, Oregon marked the twentieth anniversary of enacting the Death with Dignity Act, allowing terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients to end their life by ingesting a lethal medication prescribed by their physician. In U.S. public discourse, medical aid-in-dying is frequently equated with the terminology and morality of suicide, much to the frustration of those who use and administer

Anthropological Association 2019. 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

Based on an ethnography of clinical practices around gender-nonconforming and transgender children in the United States, this article explores the cultural and scientific notions of identity that shape this field. It examines the practice of diagnosing true gender identity in the clinic and situates the search for the foundation of identity in the inner depths of the self, and in children as harbingers

This essay examines how meanings and practices of walking, particularly quantified walking, change according to place. Drawing together my own experience with a wearable computing device called a Fitbit at home and in my field site, East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank of Palestine, I compare quantified walking and its focus on the self with other forms of walking that highlight place. I examine

Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey. In these ritual practices, family members hold obligations and rights to the deceased, including washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the body. These funeral practices represent the dead body in strictly gendered ways. However

Ecosystem changes are happening with surprising speed and on much shorter-than-projected time scales. This essay explores the complexities of such abrupt environmental shifts, how scientists conceptualize a runaway nature, and how uncertainty poses a problem of projection and action. Its ethnographic material engages contexts where rapidly faltering projections and policies interface in unsettled ways

In this article, I examine the politics of kin-work performed by families of Tunisian foreign combatants, whose sons were recruited to jihadi militias following the 2011 Arab Spring. Here, I refer to a form of affective labor that engenders kinship relations through the performance of intentional acts. In the context of postrevolutionary Tunisia, where the state is currently embroiled in a domestic

The axolotl is a noteworthy species of salamander, one both biologically remarkable and culturally significant. Native to the canals of Xochimilco, a neighborhood in Mexico City, the charismatic species has deep connections to Mexican history and identity, as well as serving as an important model organism for scientists studying regenerative biology. Drawing on fieldwork in Mexico with restoration

This article explores how indigenous Marind of West Papua conceptualize the radical socio-environmental transformations wrought by large-scale deforestation and oil palm expansion on their customary lands and forests. Within the ecology of the Marind lifeworld, oil palm constitutes a particular kind of person, endowed with particular agencies and affects. Its unwillingness to participate in symbiotic

Anthropological Association 2018. 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

Gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into humans for the replacement of mutations causing disorders. This article stems from research conducted with a thalassemia patients’ association in Cyprus and explores how political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthrough in gene therapy is harnessed to particular objectives and narratives

This essay explores scenes of zany comedy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, across three sites: a television sketch about repeated electrical shock; the careers of freelance electricians known as vishoka; and encounters between residents and power utility inspectors. Drawing on the work of Sianne Ngai, as well as long-term ethnographic research, the essay argues that zaniness manifests the structural paradoxes

In recent years, cars have steadily colonized the sidewalks in downtown Tbilisi. By driving and parking on sidewalks, vehicles have reshaped public space and placed pedestrian life at risk. A variety of social actors coordinate sidewalk affairs in the city, including the local government, a private company called CT Park, and a fleet of self-appointed st’aianshik’ebi (parking attendants) who direct

For Tanzanians, modern bodies bear complicated toxic loads not only because of the dumping of capitalism’s harmful by-products but also because of the social-material effects of efforts designed to address insecurity, poverty, and disease. Dawa lishe(nutritious medicine) is forged in this double bind. Producers of dawa lisheproblematize toxicity as the condition under which life is attenuated, diminished

Phenomenological descriptions of landscapes, trees, and terraces, combined with oral history and historical ecology, find traces of industrialization, plant disease, and forest fires in central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more-than-human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape

What would it mean for pastoralism to be a matter of wolves rather than sheep? Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers provide one possible answer. These are onetime factories and apartment buildings that have been renovated for rehabilitation with razor wire and steel bars. Largely unregulated, these centers keep pace with Guatemala’s growing rapprochement with illicit drugs

Engaging with a series of human–plant encounters in Berlin, this article explores possibilities for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and revisiting Berlin’s postwar history of botanical research, I develop the concept of the ruderal and expand it for an anthropological inquiry of urban life. The term ruderal

This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias:

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 180–188, ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. American Anthropological Association 2018. 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

Based on almost three years of ethnographic research living in Rio de Janeiro’s suburbios, I consider how the senses comes to matter and how Pentecostalism, margins, smells, and soaps are put to work to construct new kinds of affective space. To do so, I track the way in which a fragrance composed of runoff waste from an international flavor and fragrance company has come to be understood as “pieces

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious

This article asks a deceptively simple question: what does democracy sound like? Democracy is commonly associated with various forms of voicing—political speeches, shouting protesters, filibusters in the halls Congress, or heated debates in teashops, salons, and newspapers around the world. Voice thus often functions as a metaphor for political participation and representation. Political metaphors

How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion’s potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale

In recent years, scholars have developed a vocabulary for describing scenes of insecurity, precarity, and disorder too slow to achieve recognition as crises. Concepts such as slow violence, for example, depend on forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation whose ordinariness exacerbates suffering. But not enough attention has been paid to how those mired in the experience of protracted harm

In this essay I make a case for the analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable, yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to sonic atmospheres with recent anthropological research

This article examines the effects of rumors within the Mexican and U.S. governments' militarized war on drugs. Focusing on a period during which Mexican drug organizations were strengthened and violence increased, the article follows the lives of Mexican sex workers and their clients, as well as American missionaries living in a prostitution zone in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Borders between nurco-controlled

Based on two years oj ethnographic fieldwork in mental health courts in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article juxtaposes the fixity that defines the legal concept of jurisdiction with the itineracy of homeless individuals judged by criminal courts. I assert that jurisdiction is an attempt at control: by invoking jurisdiction, courts attempt to fix people and objects within time and space so as to