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This article focuses on female bodies co‐laboring across the racial lines and academic‐activist divides to explore both the potentials and constraints of feminist solidarity in the hyper‐masculine and ultra‐nationalist normative order of the global war on terror. Anthropological studies have deconstructed phantasmatic narratives of the global war on terror by disclosing its racialized and classed structure. However, what remains understudied is how racialized female bodies are subjected to the biopower and necropower of this war. This ethnography concentrates on the feminist solidarity between Özlem Yasak and Serra Hakyemez, the coauthors of this article, which stretches over 13 years and moves between the colony and the metropole and the Global South and Global North. It examines how a Turkish academic and a Kurdish activist (both lower middle‐class women) forge, cultivate, and repair their comradeship as they move from an immigration office to their family house to neoliberal universities. Based on what we call the Other‐graphy as a new feminist method, this article argues that the global war on terror expands its reach as the humanitarian and neoliberal regimes of power recruit activists and academics to the fantasy of autonomous subjectivity posited against their possible political solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carine Ayélé Durand, the director of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, discusses the museum's approach to decolonization in an interview. She emphasizes the concept of co-construction, which involves incorporating multiple perspectives, including those of the descendants of the people who made the objects in the museum, into exhibitions and other activities. The museum also focuses on researching the provenance of its collections and creating exhibitions with the free, prior, and informed consent of the communities involved. Durand acknowledges the challenges of decolonizing museums, including the need to reframe professional practices, but sees it as an opportunity to address the colonial history embedded in the collections. She also discusses the possibility of changing the museum's name to better reflect its interdisciplinary approach and the complexity of the world today. Durand believes that anthropology is well-suited to address decoloniality because it requires constant unlearning and relearning. [Extracted from the article]

Silent reverberations can also occur as enduring, puzzling presences of discomfort, anxiety, and worry, as well as expressing themselves as acts of care (Dragojlovic, Shohet, Samuels, Cassaniti, [11]; Shohet, [32]). This collection of essays invites thinking about silences as forces of affective reverberation that resonate through, within, and across social, political, and intersubjective relations of turbulent pasts and uncertain futures, as well as forms of care and layers of structural oppression. SILENT REVERBERATIONS AS AFFECTIVE FORCES As silent reverberations move through verbal and nonverbal communication in embodied intersubjective spaces, it is helpful to think of them as I affective forces i . [Extracted from the article]

Can there be a Godly ethnography? This article explores how the epistemic entailments of this question trouble our taken‐for‐granted notions about what decolonizing anthropology demands. Disciplinary decolonization aims at more‐just futures through interrogating Eurocentric ways of knowing and approaching marginalized histories and perspectives as good to think with, not merely about. I argue that far from being a radical challenge, such decolonizing calls are internal to a secular liberal anthropology. The ethical norms they embed take paradigmatic form in the ethnographic stance and its imperative to take difference seriously as a way toward self‐transformation. This stance needs to itself be provincialized as belonging to secular traditions of critical inquiry and their attendant emancipatory politics. By contrast, a Godly ethnography, as put forth in the 1980s call for an "Islamic anthropology" by some Muslim scholars working within a broader Islamization of knowledge movement, is a more radical challenge to the discipline. Here, the study of human differences is oriented neither towards self‐determination nor solidarity but towards divine devotion. Indeed, Islamic anthropology's transcendent telos is difficult to reconcile with the secular ethic of "taking seriously" motivating call for epistemic decolonization. This difficulty necessitates more‐carefully disentangling the question of disciplinary decolonization from political liberation, asking what happens the day after epistemic decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I met Juan in the summer of 2019 at the Clínica de Comunidad Sinaí, a men's drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Sinaloa, Mexico. If degree of confession were assessed only by degree of bodily exertion, it would seem that Juan's confession was elsewhere in the narrative. * * * This moment with Juan exemplifies a particular genre of fieldwork confession, which I am calling the I first disclosure i : those moments marked as the first utterance of a story that the speaker claims has never been told. If confessions require effort and revelations require overcoming resistance (Foucault et al., [4]), Juan's tortured recounting of his wife's infidelities and the chaos and pain being a known cuckold caused him could not have better fulfilled these requirements. [Extracted from the article]

So I was curious when Betty took me there one sticky-hot September day. 15 I am borrowing Sharpe's ([15], 117) method of redaction to black out Betty's ethnic slur. Betty makes an introduction: "Shirley's an old head like me." All this kept me free from Betty's temper by making me her charge and, at times, an alibi for insolence that called itself defense - this I gathered when she vowed to "bitch-slap" any "thugs" who bothered me, to which I'd said, "No thanks.". [Extracted from the article]

In his article "Secrecy", Graham M. Jones ([10]) critiques the importance anthropologists give to accessing a secret guarded by the communities that they study. What is more, during fieldwork, anthropologists establish a "before" and "after" their having gained access to a secret: its unveiling grants them entry into the intimacy of the group. Jones insists that in ethnographies, we frequently read about anthropologists overcoming various obstacles in order to gain access to that which their interlocutors protect. [Extracted from the article]

This article delineates a particular orientation to combining professional legal training and anthropological scholarship that I call ethnographic lawyering. Ethnographic lawyering takes legal form as an object of anthropological analysis, loosely inspired by the Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis's theorization of law as a social relation. If ethnographic method in anthropology entails theorizing from the concepts and experiences of interlocutors, then ethnographic lawyering analytically centers the subjectivities, logics, and relationalities that legal form both presupposes and animates. Ethnographic lawyering brings to light the contingent lives of legal form. To demonstrate this method, the article uses the example of conspiracy in early US court cases involving Al Qaeda, informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and anthropologist in litigation arising from the war on terror. An ethnographic lawyering approach illuminates how conspiracy's distinct forms in criminal law, the law of evidence, and tort law each bring far‐flung subjects, events, and actions together into reified entities even as they atomize and recombine social relations. This dynamic tension resembles the vertiginous nature of conspiracy theorizing in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of socioculturally important "keywords" remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of "keyword projects" as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key "words" emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer‐grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally "key" within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of "rapport," it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond "keyword talk" to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about "keyness" itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and premier site of neofascist tourism, reveals just how much effort has to go into producing a scaled sense of ordinariness in this extraordinary place. In this way, ordinary life is exposed as the object, not the site, of such work. This suggests the need to reconsider our usage of ordinary life in order to attend to situations in which the category itself—not just its particular contents—has ethnographic relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1982, Wagner developed a lecture course (taught annually for the next 36 years) about the novels of Carlos Castaneda, which narrate an apprenticeship with a purported Yaqui Indian shaman in the southwest United States and Mexico.[2] The fact that Wagner himself had apprenticed with a shaman, Yapenugiai, in New Guinea took on new meaning in light of this comparison. Wagner's dissertation had just been published as a book, I The Curse of Souw i (Wagner, [29]), featuring a glowing foreword by Schneider and Wagner's own drawings and poetry. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In addition to published sources, we have drawn on our recollections, Bashkow's notes of conversations with Roy, and Roy's presentation about his intellectual biography in Bashkow's graduate seminar on the anthropology of Papua New Guinea on September 30, 2015. In his field home at Mt. Karimui, Wagner carefully read this lengthy essay 11 times over (he said he counted them), and he took it as a model for his doctoral thesis, which described Daribi kinship and social structure in terms of Daribi cultural concepts. [Extracted from the article]

Based on five years of research in a public‐hospital trauma ward in Mumbai, this article examines the fraught case study of comatose states that result from traffic‐accident injuries. It focuses on a relationship between two brothers, one injured in a motorcycle accident and in a coma, and the other caring for him. The article asks: How do people navigate life‐and‐death situations through both stillness and motion? Addressing this question requires recasting traumatic injury from a wound that lodges in a single body to an intersubjective problem of discontinuous and relational traffic. In moments of transfer to the hospital, prognosis about vital signs, and reflections on death, the embodiment of and care for traumatic injury materializes through uneven relationships of intermittent motion. The article develops the analytic of vital traffic to describe these relationships and analyzes the temporal and spatial discontinuities that shape and undermine stability after injury occurs. Differences in vital traffic matter to patients, families, providers, and to the very possibility of survival. The implication of this finding is a better understanding of the sociality of injury and its care. Beyond the case of medicine, attention to vital traffic can illuminate the flux of ethnography itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do you conduct research with beings that are deeply suspicious of you, who don't trust your presence, and with good reason? This was a central question in my ethnographic work with diver fishermen in the changing marine environments of the Dominican Republic, waters populated by trickster barracuda, parrotfish who knew the schedules of fishing bans, and escape‐artist grouper. Ethnographers have historically considered mistrust as something to be overcome, an obstacle to the necessary rapport of the anthropologist. This article considers ethnographic encounters in subaquatic multispecies worlds and the methods practiced amid inherently unequal relations of power. Instead of considering trust as the ultimate achievement in ethnographic research and the gatekeeper of anthropological authority, I consider mistrust as a way of perceiving the myriad inequalities, political ecologies, and power dynamics animating our fieldsites and their human and more‐than‐human inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catherine wrote a book about her extraordinary upbringing, I With a Daughter's Eye: Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson i (M. Bateson [16]), which charmed readers with evocative portraits of her parents and their ideals. Toward the end of her residence in Iran, in 1979, Catherine's mother, who had paid a celebrated visit to Catherine's family in Iran, passed away in New York. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. 2 Bateson, Gregory, and Mary Catherine Bateson. According to Catherine's family, the book's title had a second meaning: "With a Daughter's I I i ", indicating that it was about the interrelationships among all three individuals - her mother, her father, and Catherine herself. [Extracted from the article]

Several faculty examined our classroom practices and curriculum, a second group revised our website and public communication, and others coordinated with other units on campus, including the Faculty Senate, which issued a report and created a standing social justice committee, and the faculty union, whose discussions with BIPOC faculty led to workshops on personnel policies. Search committees alone cannot improve disparities in faculty representation; rather, colleges and universities must commit to enacting policies and practices that aid in the dismantling of institutional barriers that impede the hiring and retention of BIPOC faculty. The issue is that departments and faculty have not really "bought into" the institutional call for diversity through hiring BIPOC faculty and are dismissive of the fact that our diverse student population deserves a diverse faculty. The new university administration recognized the pressing need to diversify its faculty, admitting that this was important for students and for the few overworked and overburdened BIPOC faculty already on campus. [Extracted from the article]

A growing body of critical ethnography compellingly demonstrates how "evidence‐based" trends are further privileging narrowly construed quantitative statistics, indicators, and metrics in ways that build on widespread cultural assumptions about the alleged objectivity of numerical data. In working to challenge these uncritical and positivist illusions, these studies provide more contextualized understandings and often also advocate for more pluralistic approaches that make use of multiple ways of knowing. Drawing examples from a transnational ethnographic project with epidemiologists who work to promote Indigenous health equity, I call attention here to how postpositivist approaches are already active in quantitative professions, galvanized in part by growing intersections between evidence‐based trends and rights/justice advocacy. Closer attention to such pro‐equity quantitative work highlights the need to expand the ethnographic questions that anthropologists ask about the relationships between quantification, positivism, and privilege. Such expansion stands to benefit anthropological understandings of knowledge politics in the "evidence‐based" era and contributes to ongoing conversations about how to de‐center and decolonize ethnographic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sol had been wandering for months in a speculative postnatural expedition when she met him on the littoral of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. As they walk toward what had been Palomino village, planty growths along the way burst of light as Kai pronounces what seem to be their names in diverse Indigenous and Spanish voices or tonalities, yet not only.[1] Grandson of three people and of three Indigenous women with tumbaga traits hardened by that wild and inexpugnable maternity of the mountains, Kai speaks with a serious yet serene expression. Sol perceives Kai in-between matrix forces, dressed in artisanal wefts made and embroidered by his three ancestral worlds and sending back in numbered motifs to the tissue of the world's thought: a sort of cross sea in waves ( I olas de pensamiento i ), ever on the point of breaking to surf and tap into for potentials already there as well as always unfolding in unsuspected new ways.[3] Kai explains: "The first to arrive to this world were Wayúus. (Photo by Julie Laplante) [This figure appears in color in the online issue] gl *** Sol returned to the arid lands from where she and her Wayúu friend started a pilgrimage to the Sierra to pay the earth. [Extracted from the article]

"Songs are knowledge" (gāne jñān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten‐year ethnographic engagement with Bengali‐speaking gurus and performers to discuss how singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily experience and exchanged among performers‐listeners to build togetherness in ways that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adopts Bengali understandings of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in their own right, I suggest singing as method and using the feelingful body as a research tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology's epistemic ethnocentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All public transportation was closed, ambulant military checkpoints were set up, and quarantine violators were forced into thirty-day quarantines at confinement centers. All nonessential businesses were closed.[9] The logistics of quarantine centers were put in the hands of the military.[10] With the first documented case of COVID-19 on March 18, a thirty-day military enforced quarantine was declared.[11] Only one person per household was allowed to travel outside the home, twice a week, and only for "essential business." "What can COVID do to me?" The social exclusion experienced by inhabitants of places such as El Cerro has allowed for early COVID-19 emergency measures to take the form of social triage (Biehl 2005). [Extracted from the article]

All in all, in Greece the 2008 economic crisis, and the nearly decade of austerity that followed, has created the ideal conditions for other crises to explode and make these crises profitable. GRAPH GRAPH GRAPH GRAPH GRAPH GRAPH REFERENCES CITED 1 Cabot, Heath. As for today, I would say that what we are witnessing in Greece is the ultimate backlash of the past economic crisis, which in fact never ended, despite Greece being declared as out of the crisis in January 2017. [Extracted from the article]

It does not follow, however, that the anthropology of half a century ago and more impedes the work of current anthropology. "Decolonizing US Anthropology", by Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman, is motivated by the "renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology" by members of a younger generation of anthropologists. I suggest, on the contrary, that today's anthropologists can stand on the basis of the newer discipline that has developed over the preceding several generations, and it is not necessary to expend so much labor on reinterpreting and rethinking US anthropology's past. [Extracted from the article]

We have had much excited talk about experimental ethnography and new genres of writing. Much of it acknowledges the difficulties of putting words to page. But few of the many reflections and meditations about ethnography really delve into the self‐destroying anxiety and misery that can accompany writing in anthropology and across the humanities. That many of us—from graduate students to tenured professors—have suffered bad, sometimes career‐ending trouble with writing is a public secret. I draw on my own struggle with writing and depression to try to make some sense of why desperation and worse related to writing are so relatively commonplace in anthropology today—and whether there's anything we can do about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many species, females and males form long‐term mating bonds, but marriage—and especially arranged marriage—are uniquely human traits. While marriage practices impact many cultural phenomena, they also can have evolutionary (i.e., fitness) consequences. Strongly felt but not necessarily conscious mating preferences presumably evolved because they provide fitness benefits compared to random mating, and this prediction has been supported by experimental animal studies. Arranged marriage might similarly reduce fitness in humans, but only if parents regularly choose different mates for their offspring than offspring would choose for themselves. Here we report a broad ethnographic survey exploring whether parents and offspring disagree over partner choice in arranged marriages. Using the Human Relations Area Files, we reviewed 543 ethnographies to assess the relative frequencies of parent–offspring agreement and disagreement over partner choice, the reasons for disagreement, and the outcomes of disagreement. In all world areas, parents and offspring overwhelmingly choose different partners. Parents and offspring disagreed over fitness‐relevant traits of the potential spouse, and both parties sometimes used extreme methods to influence outcomes. These findings suggest that arranged marriages may be useful for studying the effects of mate choice in humans and for assessing the unique dynamics of human mating systems. [parent–offspring conflict, mate choice, cross‐cultural] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multispecies ethnographic projects are venturing "beyond the human" (Kohn 2013), but how far can they go and remain anthropological? The answer depends on whether such projects align with the surge of ethological research on animal cultures. Based on my fieldwork on wild horses in Galicia, Spain, I make a case for an ethologically informed ethnography that extends cultural analysis to other social species. In this project, I used ethological techniques of direct observation but analyzed the results using Erving Goffman's concepts of face, footing, and civil inattention. My analysis inverts Clifford Geertz's classic study of the Balinese cockfight by making horse sociality the center of analysis, rather than regarding these animals as representations of human status concerns. I argue that this approach can be usefully applied across the range of taxa that evince culture, particularly those caught up in conservation efforts. In developing this claim, I draw on ethnoprimatologists' efforts to synthesize multispecies ethnography with ethological methods and perspectives. [multispecies ethnography, animal cultures, ethology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, Heizer (1978, 14-15) declares an end to the old-style ethnography and an uncertain future for cultural anthropology because of the passing of the older generation of California Indians. Many California tribes in this body of early anthropological literature are described as being extinct, especially those along the coast of California under the influence of the Spanish missions (Field 1999; Kroeber and Heizer 1970; Panich 2013). US Government officials in the land-claims cases from 1946 to 1959 use Kroeber's (1925) I Handbook of the Indians of California i and other early anthropological works that are viewed as definitive research on California Indian peoples despite insufficiencies and outsider perspectives (Shipek 1989). I am the only California Indian tenure-track professor on campus - maybe the only one in Berkeley's history so far - and one of only eight California Indian tenure-track professors in the entire UC system. [Extracted from the article]

Sally and her sister Patty attended school together, both graduating with honors in 1962 from the Westtown School, a private Quaker academy established in 1799, then attending Wellesley College together, Sally majoring in anthropology within an integrated department of sociology and anthropology. After returning to Stockholm, Hannerz sent Sally his unpublished 1970 conference paper titled "Management of Danger", which became the inspiration for Sally's doctoral project in "Dover Square", her pseudonym for the public housing project where she conducted research between March 1975 and September 1976. With a rich body of ethnographic data at hand, Sally returned to the concept of vernacularization in an article (Merry and Stern 2005) and book (Merry 2006), but her understanding of the process shifted significantly. Neither a strident critique of international human rights nor a righteous argument on its behalf, human rights vernacularization provided an empirically grounded framework for understanding the unavoidable complexities in "translating international law into local justice" (Merry 2006; see also Goodale and Merry 2007). [Extracted from the article]

In the United States, media and policy discourses reduce migrant youth to various abbreviated tropes: the victim, the threat, the economic migrant, the model minority. While Gabriela initially sketched from photographs, fieldnotes, and her and my memories, Delia added layers of ethnographic detail, such as the slight tilt of her father's hat and the colors of her treasured bracelet - the only personal item that she surreptitiously kept with her in detention. Illustrator Gabriela Afable enlisted the design application Procreate® to visually render the narrative, allowing for sufficient abstractions to conceal Delia and her family's identity and for ready adaptation of illustrations in response to shifts in our collective creative process. Discussions of Indigeneity are critically important to understanding the ways colonial domination, neoliberal capitalism, and securitized approaches to migration management disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples over time (Heidbrink 2020). [Extracted from the article]

In this article, I describe my ongoing bioethnographic collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of exposure scientists in environmental engineering and health. First, I explain how and why integrating ethnography and number‐based disciplines is such a complex, time‐consuming, and worthwhile process, when ethnography produces a kind of excessive "big data" that is not easily enumerated. Then I describe three of our current bioethnographic projects that seek to make better numbers about how (1) neighborhoods, (2) water distribution, and (3) employment and chemical exposures shape bodily processes in a highly unequal world. To conclude, I reflect on how we might harness ethnographic excess for making better numbers and thus better knowledge, and also how bioethnographic collaboration inevitably transforms ethnography even as we insist on its excess. [collaboration, methodology, ethnography, big data, biomedical science] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our manifesto is a means not just to participate in the vibrant theorization of multimodality that has unfolded over the last several years in the discipline but to embrace an ambivalence towards its promise and potential and to offer an invitation for you to do the same. Multimodal Ambivalence: A Manifesto for Producing in S@! We conclude this short essay by discussing the experiments we will take up to create a different sort of review process for this type of work, one that is transparent, dialogic, and guided by the key tenets of our manifesto. We hope this model, which draws from previous work to reimagine the peer-review process that centers feedback as a reciprocal process (Nolas and Varvantakis 2019), will actively shift how we imagine the process of peer review in the future, calling for a more processual, humane form of knowledge production that eschews the elitism from which many of our academic tools, protocols, institutions, and distribution channels have emerged. [Extracted from the article]

As Leniqueca Welcome (2020) writes, the only anthropology that is appropriate for our times is an abolitionist anthropology, which seeks to dismantle "white supremacist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist formations" toward a discipline aimed at "material transformation." The discipline of anthropology faces significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I contend that our work will be relevant and worthwhile to the extent that we address the injustices highlighted by Jobson and Rosenzweig - past, present, and future - and concur with Welcome and Thomas: the forms of anthropology that do not seek to redress and repair may just as well burn. [Extracted from the article]

This article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle‐class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle‐class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, and interpersonal claims on time, creating hybrid approaches to time management that I refer to as chrono‐socialism with Chinese characteristics. This balancing act is gendered: women, and especially mothers, are charged with protecting the moral status of their families and their children through effective temporal balancing. Paying attention to moments of discordant expectations, in the form of expressions of impatience, can illuminate the logics of temporal balancing in the domains of work, play, and rest. [time, morality, impatience, socialism with Chinese characteristics, China] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Penelope Harvey, a professor of social anthropology, ethnographic researcher and author, is presented. Some of the issues she addressed are interested in how infrastructure projects are imagined, created and sustained, why she does not consider herself as an anthropologist of climate change, interest in nuclear power and ways in which her research on nuclear life intersect with climate issues or climate change.

Complexity is everywhere. From biology to genomics, from anthropology to public policy, experts are marveling at the complexity of the phenomena they study. Yet in recent years, scholars have warned against taking all of this complexity at face value. In this spirit, this article frames "complexity" as an epistemic artifact traceable through particular histories and traditions of knowledge‐making. Attributions of relative complexity to different societies have a long history in anthropology. Archaeologists, in particular, have defined and redefined, debated and deconstructed complexity, leaving behind a lively textual trail. Examining this trail as a case study, the article investigates some of the different and sometimes conflicting logics behind what gets to count as complex, when, and why, as well as behind the more general expansion of complexity's reach in recent decades. By doing so, it exemplifies a way of approaching complexity as an anthropological problem and as a dominant problematic of our times. [knowledge, complexity, epistemology, archaeology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary North American Muslim congregations involved in the "progressive Muslim movement," prayer practices rework tradition in recognizably Muslim ways while nevertheless differing markedly from those of most mosques. Ethnographic description and participant narratives shed light on the process through which intercorporeality impacts interpretation of Islamic gender norms, outlining the connections among epicene prayer space, bodily proximity, multivocality, and multicorporeality in creating support for feminist and queer religious interpretations and solidarity with marginalized others. Interreligious critiques of such nonconformist approaches have tended to treat nonconformist Muslims as inappropriately concerned with individual liberties or as individual activists seeking media attention. Attention to alterity in context, however, demonstrates that alternative understandings develop not from individual beliefs, practices, or desires but rather through somatic practice within a community of like‐minded co‐religionists learning new habits through intercorporeality. [progressive Muslims, performativity, congregational prayer, intercorporeality and embodiment, sexual diversity and gender variance] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the example of Andean archaeology, this article focuses on subtle forms of inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship‐based and egalitarian, rejecting explicit hierarchy. I describe this as performative informality and argue that it stems from a meritocratic ideology that inadvertently reproduces Euro‐American white‐male privilege. In a discipline that prides itself on its friendliness, openness, and alcohol‐fueled drinking culture, those who find themselves unable to enact or perform informality appropriately are at a distinct disadvantage. Drawing from a multisited ethnography of Andeanist archaeologists, I make the case that it is the ephemerality and plausible deniability of performative informality that makes it hard to recognize and thus mitigate against it. In doing so, I draw on and contribute to the theorization of gender/class intersectionality in anthropology and science studies, US conceptualizations of meritocracy in academia and higher education, and feminist Jo Freeman's concept of "the tyranny of structurelessness." [anthropology of science, ethnography of archaeology, class, gender, anthropology of work and education] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the multimodal ethnography of postcards to highlight its relations to the colonial medium. Topics discussed include history and background on research on postcards, multimodal virtues in open systems, and how these approaches may influence scholars to do conduct more experiments.

With a central interest in translation as an inherent condition of subjects in contexts of migration, this article encourages a dialogue between ethnographic forms of expression and studies on translation. My exploration of the links between anthropology and translation, as well as their visual and poetic contours, comes through a conversation with Ruth Behar, a writer‐anthropologist whose work is deeply rooted in several modes of translation, both through and beyond words, as she reflects upon diasporic identities. Through the critical reading of her observations, I hope to offer fresh insights into textual and visual possibilities of translation in anthropological writing, as well as provide an understanding of the complex relationship between translation, language, and the self‐other nexus. More broadly, these reflections will contribute to a wider multimodal and multidisciplinary engagement of anthropology with social studies of identity, literary studies, comparative literature, poetic anthropology, visual semiotics, multisemiotic literacy, paratranslation, and other sciences of language. [translation, ethnographic writing, language, multimodality, Ruth Behar] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular and scholarly accounts lament the demise of African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and the loss of biodiversity across the Congo Basin, but there has been less appreciation of the consequences of restricted forest access for human communities in conservation contexts. We demonstrate the usefulness of biological anthropology in combination with multispecies ethnography for anchoring the futures of BaAka foragers and African forest elephants. Tuma elephant hunters have long negotiated their communities' relationships with elephants and others who have relied on the BaAka to navigate the forest. Tracing multispecies interactions along a transnational network of elephant trails (bembo) helps us understand the ways that elephants have shaped forest structure and the fabric of existence for tuma and others. Bembo facilitate movement across watersheds and may prove a critical tool in the development of culturally relevant conservation practices. [foragers, elephants, multispecies, BaAka, Congo Basin] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic theater making is not just a modality for staged representation or reenactment. It is a modality of radical anthropological knowledge coproduction, one that disrupts authorship, self, linearity, and proposition‐based knowledge through multimodal, multisensorial, collaborative, and embodied processes. In both incubation and performance, multimodal and multisensorial elements such as voice, body, memory, sound, movement, text, rhythm, velocities, and dialogic relations to other media combine, collide, and fuse to invent ways of knowing, expressing, and documenting. I argue that this multimodal alchemy works not just through the fusion of novel elements but through well‐known theater‐creation processes designed to rewire relations to self, other, language, body, and creativity. Through a discussion of the alchemy of ensemble‐building processes and physical theater tableau creation, and drawing from ten years of work in this arena with twenty different projects, I offer a window into the potential of collective theater making as a mode of anthropological practice that strikes to the core of what we do and what we hold at stake. [theater, ethnography, embodiment, ways of knowing, multimodality] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Vesna Vucinic Neškovic, a professor with the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Belgrade in Serbia, is presented. Topics discussed include her academic education in anthropology, reason for her decision to return to Serbia instead of taking a doctoral program in the U.S., and the major challenges faced by the World Council of Anthropological Associations.

GLO:AAN/01jun21:aman13555-gra-0001.jpg PHOTO (COLOR): . gl June C. Nash (Photograph courtesy of Laura Nash) June Nash, distinguished professor emerita of anthropology at the Graduate Center and City College of the City University of New York, died December 9, 2019, in Massachusetts. Nash joined anthropologist Helen Safa to organize a 1974 conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Latin American women's economic, political, and social participation (Nash 1997). At the conference, Nash and Safa were met with a women's picket line challenging their motives and accusing them of an "imperialist takeover" (Nash 2007, 58). Nash secured National Science Foundation support (1988-1991) to bring undergraduate students to Chiapas for fieldwork experience and additional NSF support for a graduate student field school in Chiapas in the 1990s. [Extracted from the article]

REFERENCES CITED 1 Bailey, F. G. 1958. Bailey's next move was to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, founded just the year before by Max Gluckman, who had taught at Oxford from 1947 to 1949. In 1964, Bailey founded a new social anthropology department at the University of Sussex. Bailey made use of what Gluckman (2006) called "the method of apt illustration" (p.15), drawing not only from his own fieldwork but also Fredrik Barth's among Swat Pathans, twentieth-century British and French politics, and the infamous "Valachi hearings" to exemplify his broad view of political process. [Extracted from the article]

I Borderlands Curanderos i eloquently describes the life and times of two "faith" healers, Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo, who grew up in Mexico and practiced their craft in the borderlands of Texas, Arizona, and California during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fortunately, Jaramillo had one powerful ally, J. T. Canales, a South Texas lawyer and legislator whose mother had been cured by Jaramillo after two physicians had tried and failed. In this case, I think the story in this short book might be carried forward by including a better description of Niño Fidencio, a later folk healer who, thanks to his successful treatment of President Plutarco Calles, is arguably better known than either Urrea or Jaramillo. [Extracted from the article]

Between 2006 and 2009, I attended various peacebuilding and antiwar events in Lebanon, from dialogue sessions and workshops to lectures and demonstrations. One refrain at these events was that war should be avoided because it was dehumanizing or, in a slightly different form, that it results in a loss of humanity. Alongside these gatherings, I conducted interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with former militia fighters from Lebanon's war (1975–1990). Together, these encounters led me to question notions of dehumanization in discourses of war and peace. Did war dehumanize? Did dehumanization lead to war? Did perpetrators lose their humanity through acts of killing? Did their actions stem from the dehumanization of the other? This article explores these questions and interrogates the notion of humanity. I argue that in allowing the notion of humanity to shape our politics, and in centering the loss of humanity in discourses of war and peace, both war and peace are invariably depoliticized. [war, dehumanization, combatants, humanity, Lebanon] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral development in early childhood has recently raised heightened interest across social sciences. Integrating controlled methods into ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates how Chinese preschool children develop their understanding of "merit," an important fairness principle in resource allocation, through socialization of biaoxian hao. Whereas the experimental data taps into distributing reward based on how much one contributes to collective work, a standard attribute of "merit" in psychology literature, ethnographic analysis reveals how children's understanding of merit is mediated by the cultural discourse of biaoxian hao, a significant moral framework in contemporary China that refers to self‐presentation in authority‐evaluation contexts, with a hierarchical dimension. Ethnography further demonstrates the developmental trajectory of learning biaoxian hao and the powerful disciplinary mechanism of overt social comparison and moral evaluation. By showing how two basic moral concerns, sensitivity to fairness and inclination to impress authority, intersect in early development in cultural contexts, this mixed‐methods research provides a direction for cultural anthropology to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of moral development. [merit, fairness, biaoxian, moral development, China] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a twenty‐first‐century anthropology of learning: comparative, integrating, powerful, speaking truth to power, and engaging in ethnographic, humanistic, and scientific investigation. Such an enterprise welcomes a wide variety of methods. An anthropology of learning includes—but distinguishes—education, socialization, enculturation, and schooling. It encompasses formal, informal, and nonformal learning. It grapples with definitions of learning and emphasizes that these are part of every human experience. Some learning happens in schools; only some of the learning matches what is explicitly intended. Sometimes learning is fostered by teaching, but pedagogy is not always required. Anthropology is an ideal discipline for investigating learning, education, and schooling—but these topics are not widely known in the field in general. The article proposes three centers of attention and provides an extended example, the "thirty‐million‐word gap." [learning, schooling, education, word gap] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long‐standing themes in cultural anthropology—tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency—even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders? The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long‐standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]