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Anthropology Comes In When Translation Fails Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Anne-Christine Taylor
English Abstract:Instead of focusing directly on the epistemological problems facing the anthropologist, this paper aims to reverse the ethnographic lens and reflect first on what the ethnographic situation does for the ‘ethnographed’: what kind of work do the subjects of an inquiry engage in when they consent to an ethnographic relation? What affordances does it offer them? Briefly put, my answer
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Field Aporias in Minho (Portugal) Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 João Pina-Cabral
English Abstract:Basing itself in the three aspects of the world that Kant proposed (as source, as domain and as limit), this article argues that the ethnographic gesture is correspondingly marked by three registers of encounter: empathy, company, community. Taking recourse to an ethnographic vignette about an encounter with a man on a bike, it explores the sense of community that marked my ethnographic
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Cracks in the System and Anthropology Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Bjørn Enge Bertelsen,Ruy Llera Blanes
We begin by thanking our colleague Eldar Bråten for taking the time to read and comment on our article with such thoroughness. We continue right away with a response. A key aspect of Bråten’s critique is his claim that it is difficult to understand how we reason and, therefore, ‘how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose?’ In order to reply to such
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‘Not as single spies’: a review of European Social Anthropology 2020 Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Dominic Martin
This review article surveys all of the articles published in the major Anglophone European social anthropology journals in 2020. Taking a perspective from Joel Robbins’ theorising of ‘the anthropology of the good’ as a critique of the primacy of ‘dark anthropology’, it highlights the rich range of ethnography and analysis recently produced. Focusing on the continuing interest in ontology, environment
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Introduction: Auto-Anthropocenes Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-12-17 Patrick Laviolette, Tatiana Argounova-Low
Is the planet on a one-way collision course with self-destruction? Are cars, roads and everything that goes along with them the main culprits for the end of the world as we know it? In addressing the nebulous, amorphous and material ties between vehicles and infrastructure, this Special Section of SA/AS provides some cross-cultural histories for better understanding commonplace as well as alternative
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Bodies of and against austerity: gendered dispossession, agency and struggles for worth in Portugal Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-19 Patrícia Alves de Matos
This article explores the relationships between the body, gendered dispossession and agency under conditions of austerity in Portugal. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in a Portuguese post-industrial town, this article focuses on the examination of how concrete physical experiences and social anxieties framed working-class women’s experiences and explanations of the austerity-led
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Safe and sound: listening to Guns N’ Roses in the car Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-17 Simone Dennis
The idea that road safety could be secured using sound – particularly talkback radio and music – is fascinating. This paper explores Ford’s recent and unprecedented level of investment in car stereos in its 2018 models alongside the terrifying 2014 anti-speeding commercial produced by the Northern Ireland Department of Environment (Road Safety). The commercial makes use of one musical track styled
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Corporeal moderation: digital labour as affective good Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Rae Jereza
Digital labour scholars have produced insightful analyses of the unpaid, creative, affective labour performed by users on social media platforms. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the hidden labour of content moderators: underpaid, contingent workers who enable the sanitised online spaces that users take for granted by removing disturbing content. Drawing on ethnographic
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Deportability and spirituality in a hostile environment: an intersubjective perspective Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-09 Anna Waldstein
The United Kingdom’s ‘hostile environment for immigrants’ is having distressing effects on people of African Caribbean heritage, especially those who have been threatened with deportation. While some research demonstrates a strong connection between the threat of deportation (deportability) and abjection, deportable migrants may also develop strategies (e.g. religious participation) to work around
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Ball, Christopher. 2018. Exchanging words: language, ritual, and relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. 288 pp. Hb.: US$49.95. ISBN: 9780826358530. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Juan Javier Rivera Andía
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PennyHarvey, ChristianKrohn‐Hansen and Knut G.Nustad (eds.) 2019. Anthropos and the material. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$26.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐0286‐4. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Juan Javier Rivera Andía
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Zani, Leah. 2019. Bomb children. Life in the former battlefields of Laos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 184 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐0485‐1. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Astrea Nikolovska
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On the educational mode of existence: Latour, meta-ethnography and the social institution of education Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-11 Jonathan Tummons
This article constitutes an argument for both the use and expansion of the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour, as established in his recent work An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME; 2012). Drawing on ethnographies of education as a methodology for empirical inquiry and specifically on meta-ethnography as a methodology for establishing objectivised knowledge concerning education in a manner
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The absent presence of the deportation apparatus: methodological challenges in the production of knowledge on immigration detention Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-21 Jukka Könönen
Due to the difficulties in accessing detention facilities, the discussion on immigration detention often draws on limited empirical data with varying degrees of attention paid to the heterogeneity of the detained population and their different stakes in an impending removal. Although a closed institution, various legal and administrative processes related to the enforcement of immigration decisions
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Upland pioneers: an introduction Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Rosalie Stolz, Oliver Tappe
Drawing on various ethnographic case studies from upland Southeast Asia, this special issue explores uplanders’ pioneering agency and challenges the stereotype of the remote and marginal uplander. We consider upland areas as dynamic sites of future-making and change – initiated by pioneering individuals or local elites who seek out and explore different potential sources of (economic and spiritual)
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Controlled experiments: ethnographic notes on the intergenerational dynamics of aspirational migration and agrarian change in upland Laos Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Paul-David Lutz
This article provides ethnographic insights into the Southeast Asian peasantry’s engagements with agrarian change. It speaks both to Southeast Asian studies’ longstanding interest in the dynamics of socio-economic transformation, and to anthropology’s burgeoning focus on how future-oriented aspirations are produced, negotiated and enacted under specific socio-political, material and historical conditions
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Traditional culture as a vehicle for Christian future-making: ethnic minority elites pioneering self-representations in northern Myanmar Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Ying Diao
This paper explores the pioneering work for future-making by one of Myanmar’s non-dominant ethnic groups. Specifically, it examines how the Christian Lisu elite strategically, and somewhat opportunistically, use ‘traditional culture’ to perform ethnicity against the background of their ‘double-minority’ status vis-à-vis the dominant populations of the (Kachin) state and (Myanmar) nation. It analyses
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Hmong Christian elites as political and development brokers: competition, cooperation and mimesis in Vietnam’s highlands Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Seb Rumsby
This article focuses on the role of new Hmong religious leaders – predominantly young men – who have played an important role in spreading Protestant Christianity across Vietnam’s highlands over the past 30 years. These pastors and evangelists have directly challenged the authority of previously established Hmong local elites, whose legitimacy rested on traditional religious authority and/or state
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‘Before others’: construction pioneers in the uplands of northwestern Laos Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Rosalie Stolz
Given that houses have become a key signifier of an orientation towards the future, several villagers in Pliya can be regarded or regard themselves as pioneers of the construction of a new type of house. I will suggest here that the construction of new concrete houses is not to be understood merely as an adoption of lowland styles but as a self-conscious and selective use of a style of building. Those
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Soothsayers and horoscopes: new modes of inquiring into the future in northern Laos Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Vanina Bouté
This article focuses on the transformations of therelationship to the future and to its knowledge among mountain populations inSoutheast Asia in a context of economic and social change. Since its spectaculareconomic development in the 2000s, Laos has experienced an increase inrural-urban migration, which has transformed the configuration of the country.The massive resettlement of highlanders at the
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Phong pioneers: exploring the sociopolitics of mythology in upland Laos Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Oliver Tappe
Hat Ang, mythological culture hero of the Phong (an ethnic minority in Laos), exemplifies the figure of the upland pioneer. Taking the legend of Hat Ang as a vantage point, this paper discusses the ethnohistory of this specific Austroasiatic group and offers a mythological perspective into the discussion of uplanders’ agency and future-making. This key myth of the Phong addresses questions of remoteness
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Power and transcendence: a comment on upland pioneers Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Guido Sprenger
Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet
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Introduction: On the politics of waiting Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-03 Zerrin Özlem Biner, Özge Biner
This special section sheds light on the relationship between sovereignty and temporality through practices of waiting in the militarised Kurdish cities and border provinces of Turkey. It reveals different feelings, practices, discourses, and imaginations derived from the waiting experience of citizens and refugees living in the midst or aftermath of the states of exceptions at the margins of the sovereign
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Waiting for the disappeared: waiting as a form of resilience and the limits of legal space in Turkey Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-19 Özgür Sevgi Göral
This article situates the case of Temizöz and Others in a broader context of sovereignty, law and waiting in Turkey. To do so, I put the production of a category for the relatives of the disappeared through a peculiar temporal lens, scrutinising different waiting types that create intertwined notions of hope, loyalty, anxiety and ambiguity. Different forms of waiting mean different temporalities, along
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Curfew ‘until further notice’: waiting and spatialisation of sovereignty in a Kurdish bordertown in Turkey Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-11 Omer Ozcan
This paper explores counterinsurgency strategies of the Turkish state during the 1990s and how they affected people’s experience of time and space in Yüksekova, a Kurdish border town in the south-eastern tip of Turkey. The paper takes up the perspective of children to think about how forcing people to wait indefinitely enables new forms of population and territorial control. Drawing on autobiographical
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Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in a Turkish border town Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Özge Biner, Zerrin Özlem Biner
This ethnography examines two Syrian refugee women’s experiences of waiting while living in the Turkish–Syrian border town of Antep. Since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, 3.5 million Syrians have left their homes to seek refuge in Turkey. With the 2014 Temporary Protection Regulation granting Syrians temporary residence and limited access to social services, the Turkish state developed state
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Waiting for justice amidst the remnants: urban development, displacement and resistance in Diyarbakir Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-31 Sardar Saadi
This paper looks into the lives of displaced people and their material bonds with the past while waiting for justice during exceptional times in Diyarbakir, Turkey’s Kurdistan. Diyarbakir is known for its central location in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey for many decades. In August 2015, the old city of Diyarbakir called Sur joined other resisting cities and districts in the Kurdish region of Turkey
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Stratifying academia: ranking, oligarchy and the market-myth in academic audit regimes Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-09-21 John Welsh
This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially
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The potential of intangible loss: reassembling heritage and reconstructing the social in post-disaster Japan Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-11 Andrew Littlejohn
Attitudes towards cultural heritage have long been characterised by an ‘endangerment sensibility’ concerned with preventing losses. Recently, however, critical heritage scholars have argued that loss can be generative, facilitating the formation of new values and attachments. Their arguments have focused primarily on material heritage, whose risk of damage and disappearance is accelerating due to growing
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Regnier, Denis. 2021. Slavery and essentialism in highland Madagascar: ethnography, history, cognition. New York: Routledge. 208 pp. Hb: US$115.00. ISBN: 9781350102477. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Sabrina Helen Bennett Hardenbergh
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LeighBinford, LesleyGill and SteveStriffler (eds.) 2020. Fifty years of peasant wars in Latin America. New York: Berghahn Books. 228 pp. Hb.: US$120.00. ISBN: 9781789205619. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Rosana Carvalho Paiva
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Moore, Amelia. 2019. Destination Anthropocene: science and tourism in The Bahamas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 216 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9780520298934. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Brittany Schaefer
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Hinojosa, Servando Z. 2020. Maya bonesetters: manual healers in a changing Guatemala. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 256 pp. Hb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9781477320297. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Gemma Celigueta
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William C.Olsen and ThomasCsordas (eds.) 2019. Engaging evil: a moral anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books. 322 pp. Hb. US$135.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78920‐213‐7. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Ana Ivasiuc
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Wright, Susan, StephenCarney, John BenedictoKrejsler, Gritt BykærholmNielsen and Jakob WilliamsØrberg. 2020. Enacting the university. Danish university reform in an ethnographic perspective. Dordrecht: Springer. 348 pp. Pb: US$24.99. ISBN: 9402419209. Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Mariya Ivancheva
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Terms of engagement Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-06-14 Marilyn Strathern
Anthropology is nothing if it is not a particular way of describing the world. Yet what is most precious to it – the terms and concepts that mark it as a discipline – can also be the most tricky. When resurgent boundaries and exclusions twist truth telling and faking in any which way, anthropology might find a new urgency in thinking about the conceptual life it tries to express. How it engages has
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Developing statizens: biometric technologies and digital identification Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-05 Asher Goldstein
In what follows, I elaborate on one of Appadurai’s key points (2021): that the concept of ‘statizen’ highlights global right-wing state re-articulation through digital identification. In order to do so, I instrumentalise Appadurai’s argument that the ‘statizen’ is characterised by the ‘centrality of bureaucratic documentation as the sole and over-riding criterion of citizenship’ and the ‘success in
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Grammars of liberalism Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Taras Fedirko, Farhan Samanani, Hugh F. Williamson
Liberalism has been fundamental to the making of the modern world, at times shaping basic assumptions as to the nature of the political, and in other cases existing as a delimited political project in contention with others. Across its long history, liberal projects have taken a diverse range of forms, which resist easy reduction to a single logic or history. This diversity, however, has often escaped
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Minority sexualities, kinship and non-autological freedom in Montenegro Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Čarna Brković
I propose an alternative conception of freedom in an actually existing liberal order by focusing on how gay men in Podgorica, Montenegro maintain love and kinship relations. For theorists of late liberalism, the demands of liberal freedom and those of social relatedness have been seen as opposed. By contrast, in Podgorica we can trace a notion of non-autological freedom understood as an ability to
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Reductio ad cambitas: The grammar of liberalisation in Northeast Brazil Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Aaron Ansell
Liberalism follows a grammar when representing voluntary social relationships that involve some element of exchange; it reduces them to relations of pure exchange. This paper examines the transmission of this grammar across cultural lines, from the progressive officials comprising Brazil’s Workers’ Party government (2003–2016) to the inhabitants of the country’s northeastern backlands (sertão) whose
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Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Natalie Morningstar
This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on fieldwork with artist-activists in post-recession Dublin, I recount their fraught efforts to use adventurous artistic expression to provoke a critical awakening in an audience of strangers, who instead respond with derision. My focus is thus on a narrow but prevalent feature of artists’ work and lives, and the public’s experience of challenging
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‘When I see what democracy is…’: bleak liberalism in a French court Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Matei Candea
Despite extensive writing about liberalism in anthropology, liberal subjects and publics remain strangely elusive as objects of ethnographic enquiry. Anthropologists have mostly studied liberalism in light of new forms that supersede and reconfigure it, or in light of the marginalised subjects it excludes. These approaches have produced useful critical insights, but they have left liberal publics and
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Liberalism in the breach Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-30 Dace Dzenovska
This afterward draws together insights from the articles in the special section on liberalism and points to a growing disjuncture between the liberalism of those who claim to represent liberalism and the liberalism of those who are accused of illiberalism even as they engage in a variety of liberal practices. The articles suggest that it is important to look for capillary liberal practices in the shadows
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‘Are you paying for somebody else’s?’ The value of secrecy in the uses of DNA paternity tests in the USA Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-20 Mélanie Gourarier
Based on an ethnographic study carried out in 2015–16 in a New York DNA testing centre, this article focuses on the different costs (economic, emotional, symbolic and political) of a paternity test result. Whether a mother is trying to defend her son’s interests, or a man wants to check the genetic authenticity of his parentage, the material drawn on here reveals the issues at stake in situations understood
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Interstitial urban spaces: housing strategies and the use of the city by homeless asylum seekers and refugees in Trento, Italy Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-16 Giuliana Sanò, Giulia Storato, Francesco Della Puppa
This contribution presents the results of an ethnographic research, conducted in the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy), which investigated the living conditions of refugees and asylum seekers outside the reception system and explored the heterogeneous and fragmented world of pathways they undertake in search of work and accommodation. From the point of view of housing, the investigation has shown
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Ambiguous entanglements: infrastructure, memory and identity in indigenous Evenki communities along the Baikal–Amur Mainline Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-07-12 Olga Povoroznyuk
The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) project has been the embodiment of (post-)Soviet modernisation with its promises of economic prosperity, mobility and connectivity. It boosted regional development and introduced new forms of mobility, but also accelerated sedentarisation, assimilation and social polarisation among Evenki, an indigenous people who had been living in the region long before the arrival
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Creeping racism: a cultural conception of politics Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-13 Chiara De Cesari
My piece endeavours to explain why the new far right is likely here to stay, in Europe, by focusing on its fundamentalist, racist understanding of culture. My argument is that the far right’s culturalist conception of politics circulates well beyond these parties’ immediate constituencies. Indeed, it is sedimenting into a new culturalist common sense, a form of everyday racism. I want to draw attention
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‘Excesses’ of modernity: mundane mobilities, politics and the remaking of the urban Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-12 Alice Stefanelli
Cars are celebrated as the technical and symbolic epitome of modernity but are also heavily implicated in the making of climate change, imbricated within a seemingly all-powerful global capitalist system. What can an anthropological analysis of traffic in urban areas tell us about the enduring strength of this system? While cars in Beirut are both desired and necessary to move about, strong feelings
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Anthropology and the postliberal challenge Social Anthropology (IF 1.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Olaf Zenker
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama (1992) famously framed the victory of liberalism and its universal acceptance as ‘the end of history’. To the extent that this sentiment has, of late, lost its grip on the popular imagination so that ‘the end of history’ has itself come to an end, we have been entering a postliberal world. This postliberal condition of Brexit, Trumpism and the