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Ancestor worship is regarded as the key element of the Han people's belief system across most of China. However, the rituals pertaining to death, such as in funerals and annual ancestor worship, vary from place to place. For decades, the state has made tremendous efforts to reform and standardise funerals consistent with its path to modernization by insisting on more socialist practices rather than those that are perceived as 'superstitious' and 'irrational', such as burning paper and incense or performing rituals. I argue that despite regulating the use of funeral materials or memorial types, the state has failed to reform the essence of death rituals, that is, the duty of filial piety and people's conception of the afterlife. In addition, funerals and other rituals related to death contribute to individual's social reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) provides for the recognition of rights and interests which arise from the traditional laws and customs of Australian First Nation peoples. Processing applications for a determination of native title can take many years and involves numerous stakeholders, presentation of evidence of ongoing connection with the land and sea within a claim area, negotiations with other parties including from industry and government, as well as negotiations between Indigenous groups. The process can be long, arduous, and often outcomes fail to satisfy the expectations of native title claimants. In this paper we investigate how individuals who either disagree with the premise underlying native title, or who have suffered negative impacts through the course of native title claims, may be either targeted by, or swept up in, Australian sovereign citizen rhetoric. We aim to contextualise presentations of sovereign citizen ideas in native title claim processes by providing an overview of the history of sovereign citizen thought, and examples of its contemporary expression in some Australian online forums. In doing this we aim to provide a broad foundation for future research into the issue. The dialogue in sovereign citizen online communities exposes people to extremism and superconspiracies. This article will provide a theoretical framework and historical context to the Australian sovereign citizen phenomena and describe online amplification of disinformation in Australia that has the potential to cause harm. We illustrate how stakeholders who are drawn to relatively moderate online content (such as opposing native title) may be radicalised through gradual exposure to extremist anti‐government sentiment and hate speech. This article highlights the need for further research into sovereign citizenry in Australia, and strategies for native title practitioners to engage claimants who subscribe to and disseminate sovereign citizen disinformation in native title processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vanuatu sand drawing has been listed by UNESCO since 2006 and has both fascinated and puzzled researchers from various disciplines for over a century. The inherent multi‐dimensionality of the practice makes analysis complex, and until very recently developing a systematic methodology to study this intangible art form was difficult. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap with the analysis of a corpus of sand drawings documented on the island of Paama in 2019. A detailed methodological toolkit is proposed to better understand the complex morphology of the drawings and their multi‐layered meaning and function. This paper offers the first few steps along a journey toward designing integrated comparative methods of analysis that can not only potentiate unprecedented insights into the cultural practice of Vanuatu sand drawing, but also more broadly help us understand how worldviews, beliefs and societal structures spread across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the political economy of Australia's prison industrial complex and its severe impact on Indigenous communities. Taking a historical perspective, the paper moves between a broader analysis of the forced extraction of Indigenous labour by the state and private enterprise and the violence against Indigenous people which accompanies it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous youth living in Alice Springs are subject to routine forms of surveillance, facilitated by a range of stakeholders, including police, security guards, government agents, business owners and members of their own communities. 'The problem' of youth is the subject of much attention in media and community forums as well as Northern Territory specific legislation, resulting in increased levels of policing in town. Drawing on recently collected fieldwork data, this paper explores some of the nuances in the relationships through which these processes of surveillance are enacted. Encounters observed and described by young people themselves are often at once both intimate and oppressive. This paper will first explore recent policy approaches and then focus on some examples of youth experiences with policing to outline some of the ways in which young people navigate and resist surveillance in Alice Springs. Understanding youth experiences of surveillance and policing enables a distinctive perspective on a shifting social world, and offers insight into contemporary forms of disadvantage faced by Indigenous youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile phone usage has increased at an unprecedented rate across the Pacific over the past 10–15 years, radically transforming the way communication takes place. The catalyst for this transformation is generally attributed to the breakdown of monopolies previously held by national telecom corporations over their own domestic markets, and the entrance of one particular new provider, Digicel. This paper examines the strategies through which Digicel has managed to insert itself into the visual landscape of the urban spaces of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga. Through multimodal analysis of digital photographs from the landscapes of these countries' capital cities, the paper shows how the global company makes use of a range of techniques to establish its own place and identity as a local network. These techniques include the demonstration of largesse and dominance over competitors, slogans that stake a claim to belonging, and the use of local language terms and images that juxtapose the local with the global. Through these techniques, Digicel manages to position itself simultaneously as the provider both of fast and reliable global communication technologies and of a truly local, national service, while also radically transforming the physical spaces of our cities as it has made itself at home here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West Papuans' dependency on mangroves is a consequence of Sorong's status as a frontier town. Originally developed to accommodate the oil industry, Sorong is an attraction for Indonesian settlers who have dominated and continue to dominate the town's geographical and economic spaces. By combining multispecies ethnographic studies with issues of power relations in urban areas related to settler colonialism and racial discrimination, this paper aims to reveal marginalised human species that are interconnected with their ecosystems. In addition to exploring the interdependence between humans and other species, and their common fate, a multispecies ethnographic approach also delves into the impact of urban development on marginalised human communities and their relationship with affected species. This enables a comprehensive understanding of how the well‐being of these communities is inextricably linked to the health and survival of the entire ecosystem. Focusing on the Kokoda migrant community in Sorong, Indonesia, this article is based on research that has been conducted intermittently since 2019. A community that is accustomed to living within a mangrove ecosystem, Kokoda have the endurance to live in a degraded environment. By co‐existing with the mangrove forest, they have created a commons in the swamp as their livelihood space. Paradoxically, the Kokoda also pragmatically participate in mangrove‐planting programs instigated by both the government and private parties. However, despite the fact that urban housing development is the cause of massive mangrove deforestation, the Kokoda community is most responsible for mangrove deforestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

County Durham in the UK has witnessed dramatic social and environmental shifts over the past 50 years, yet Durham Cathedral has stood at the heart of the region, seemingly solid, unchanging and eternal. It is frequently narrated as a prestigious jewel (a national treasure) that is surrounded by a countryside (and people) that clearly bear the time‐marked scars of the processes of industrialisation and deindustrialisation. In this paper, I explore a recent moment in time when a partnership between the Cathedral and the local secular authorities aimed to rapidly transform our understanding of this space by connecting Cathedral and county through the newly laid Northern Saints' Trails. These Trails were designed as both a response to rapid changes in the local ecology and a catalyst for further transformation. The processes of this formation were ultimately delayed by the outbreak of COVID‐19, yet this external force allowed the Pilgrimage project to find new life as a powerful healing practice for those who dwell in Durham. Attention to this process of purposeful, regular pilgrimage directs our attention towards the entangled nature of the home anthropologist and their role in the co‐construction of space, leading to a call for a new articulation of both core methods in the anthropology of religion and a return to a form of prophetic anthropology (Miles‐Watson, 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2019, members of Willowra community marched on the local police station in protest against the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Yuendumu. Expressing solidarity with family at Yuendumu, individuals breached the barbwire fence of the vacant police compound. Unlike settlements such as Yuendumu, which have had resident police for decades, Willowra police station is 1 of 18 Northern Territory 'Taskforce Themis' stations set up as a temporary measure during the 2007 Intervention. Although the police presence is recent and inconstant, Lander Warlpiri Anmatyerr people have long experienced the agonistic effects of police authority in their region—beginning in 1928 with the gunning down of their relatives by Constable Murray and his accomplices during the Coniston Massacre. No charges were laid against these murderers, a reflection of the moral economy and 'politics of life' of settler society at the time. Although policies have changed, the past reverberates in the present, as people find creative ways to survive the effects of totalising state institutions and punitive regimes. Furthermore, while locals might back a police presence at Willowra, they continue to assert the importance of Warlpiri Law. This paper reflects upon narratives and events that illuminate local perceptions of police and their role in the community over time. In the course of this account, the focus shifts from policing to people's hopes that unbearable situations might improve, as they use shields both as object and metaphor to deflect the weapons of the state and maintain the Warlpiri socio‐moral order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the rhetoric and discharge of state mental health care provisions in the wake of the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker reflect the logic of elimination that underpins settler‐colonial societies. Firstly, the use of emotional politics and the diplomacy of sympathy transform the police shooting of an Aboriginal man into a simple loss of life. Secondly, the deployment of psychological services to the community specifically and only for secondary trauma victims not only erased Warlpiri trauma and foregrounded non‐Indigenous trauma, it also positioned Warlpiri people as the cause of non‐Indigenous trauma. Lastly, I explore how narratives in the mental health care sector regarding the state response simultaneously critique and reproduce settler‐colonial elimination. As an arm of the settler‐colonial state, the sector cannot help but be complicit in the ongoing elimination of indigeneity and is not exceptional as a sector in this way. Settler‐colonial attempts at care are inherently characterised by this conflict of interest, which, if there is any way to resolve it, requires a depth of critical reflection beyond politically progressive narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore approaches in establishing cross‐cultural relations between indigenous people and internal migrants in the district of West Seram (Maluku, Indonesia). According to current data, the number of people from other islands exceeds the local population but the district government neglects the ethnic issues. Emerging inequalities are becoming a challenge for internal migrants, especially in the areas of leadership and land tenure. I argue that the sense of exclusion among 'outsiders' impacts on growing social tensions and creates immobility within the social structures, giving less room for negotiations and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since independence, Solomon Islands schools have aimed to establish a national identity and unity among Solomon Islanders; however, ethnic ties to 'home' remain strong. This is particularly evident in Honiara, the densely populated and multi‐ethnic capital of Solomon Islands, when urban youth who have grown up in Honiara claim their home is in a province. This paper argues that the 'unity in diversity' narrative taught in schools emphasises the importance of an ethnic identity tied to one's province. As a result, students must find ways to build connections to home, even if they have spent little time there, creating a nostalgia for home. Two ways this occurs is through the dances they perform and the kastom jewellery they wear. I argue that the emphasis of their unique ethnic identities is necessary for youth to stake a claim in the multi‐ethnic urban landscape and within the panethnic identity of Solomon Islander. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Vanuatu, the popularity of reggae music has been on the rise since the late 1980s. Today, reggae music and reggae culture is ubiquitous. For many young people in Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital city, it is a fundamental component of their sense of belonging to the city. Their attraction to reggae derives from its messages of camaraderie, equality and justice. This paper argues that for many urban youth, playing, consuming and sharing reggae music and culture instrumentalises their urban place‐making activities and helps reterritorialise themselves in urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research, we demonstrate the extent to which its lyrics and messages resonate with youth who feel they are unable to express their social, economic and political discontent through other mediums. Furthermore, we show how for many youth, reggae conveys a sense of hopefulness that emboldens them to build a new life or 'father land' for themselves and their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is estimated that by 2050, 50% of Pacific peoples will be living out their full lives in cities and towns throughout Oceania and around the world. Over the last 35 years, previous patterns of circular migration have been giving way to permanent urban settlers and to generations born and raised in urban places. These 'urbanites' demonstrate a firm commitment to urban living in both the present and the future. In the cities, Pacific people have been building roots and making the city 'home'. This special issue focuses on some of the diverse practices Pacific urbanites employ in creating 'home', which we define as the context where they centre their social, cultural and economic worlds and the place in which they see themselves living out their aspirations and future life course. Practices range from the use of graffiti, sharing music, playing reggae, the role of artists and exhibitions, and mobile phone use. In doing so, this special issue contributes to a growing body of work focused on the ways urban‐based Pacific peoples contest essentialising stereotypes that deny their legitimacy and dismiss their urban experiences as less authentic. The collection of papers demonstrates how Pacific peoples are imagining and demonstrating their identities as Pacific urbanites reflecting their commitment to an urban Pacific, national, cultural and political belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tackles the concept of alterity through an embodied perspective. By questioning my lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event (Carel, 2008, 2016, 2021)—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of 'other' ways of being‐in‐the‐world (Merleau‐Ponty 2012 [1945]), I ask if an embodied 'chimeric‐thinking' can be used to question established notions of alterity and reshape our relationship with 'otherness' (Leistle 2015, 2016b). Building on a phenomenological approach to illness (Carel 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021), and a feminist post‐humanist approach (Haraway 1990, 1991, 2016), I present a case in which an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach focused on embodied experience may help revise dominant perspectives, providing access to understanding and engaging with profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is drawn from ethnographically informed research undertaken in 2016‒2017 pertaining to the planned modernisation of two large‐scale irrigation schemes in Bangladesh, funded by the Asian Development Bank. The research confirms existing critical irrigation anthropology on the politics and power of large‐scale irrigation modernisation and related drive to privatisation. The modernisation of the scheme aimed to increase water, energy and agricultural productivity and to include a new higher‐level irrigation management service. Irrigation, it is argued, also has considerable social consequences because it defines specific patterns of cooperation and conflict in serviced agricultural areas. The modernisation of the scheme overlooked socio‐cultural, political and ethnoecological considerations largely due to complex institutional constraints and the existing social modalities of power. In the field, using the anthropological method, information was generated in order to better understand the various stakeholder perceptions of the modernisation program and advise on practical implementations. In particular, the research noted how and in what manner dominant and influential social and political alliances control these complex waterscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Love and intimacy are personal as well as political; they are concepts that are multidimensional, complex, and, sometimes, contradictory; and are meaningful to institutions and states as well as individuals. Dynamic local and global forces generate shifts in perceptions and experiences of intimacy and love, which are mediated by a wide variety of actors, ideals, beliefs and practices. This introduction to the special issue of shifting states of love, intimacy and intimate citizenship explores how these experiences are shaped by political, sociocultural, legal and intimate borders and boundaries, both literal and metaphorical. The article points to intimate relationships that, in various ways, challenge or transgress normative boundaries, but which are simultaneously experienced as empowering and deeply meaningful to those involved. This introduction to the special issue, as a collection of ethnographically rich analyses of loving, proffers new insights into the emergence of various forms of intimacies: from love across state borders, polygamous intimacies, transnational, intercultural and online love and dating, to interspecies intimacies based on mutual love and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the privileging of the language of 'love' on dating profiles established by Papua New Guineans active on online dating sites. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), recent accessibility to the internet has led to people going online, with the aim of attracting partners and initiating relationships based on affection. I note that companionate ideals and the vocabulary of love are central to online dating, but also reflect a wider re‐imagining of intimate relationships across the country. The articulation of the vocabulary of love has a complex history in PNG, however, encompassing engagements with colonial agents, models of Christian intimacies, as well as the potent use of 'love magic'. In this context, love can signify ambiguity or coercion as much as affection, companionship or romance. At the same time, the vocabulary of love can have a powerful and efficacious effect, generating connections and capacities, particularly associated with being 'modern' and Christian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interplay between global surfing masculinities, the colonial/feminising touristic order and local cultural norms in the Philippines through an analysis of surfing masculinities and the Visayan hierarchical ordering principal sipog (supog/ulaw), or shyness/modesty/shame/embarrassment. The touristic order constructs tropical tourism destinations as effeminate, a process which marginalises, excludes or emasculates local men. However, through adherence to the masculine modes of modern surf culture, Filipino surfers on Siargao Island find a viable pathway through which to assert dominance and resist and reject the touristic order. Yet, while local men who surf on Siargao Island assert dominance and control in surfing spaces, outside these spaces their subjectivities are complicated by overarching social and class hierarchies, global inequalities and local cultural norms (sipog). In tourist spaces, their behaviours tend more towards shyness, modesty and deference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining affective motivations and meanings associated with kin‐based tattooing, this article proposes a practice of 's/kinship': the tangible inscription of relational personhood on the body. While research on the practice of Western tattooing has long been drawn into discourses of deviance and individual identity, little attention has been paid to the tattooing of social relations. Drawing on surveys and interview data, this article highlights the significance of kinship and other forms of relationality in tattooing, bringing attention to how these are manifested through the skin as expressions of social proximity, permanence, and porosity. In doing so an analytic approach to s/kinship is developed to foreground the practice of tattooing as an expression of relational personhood, one that highlights the permeability of personhood as a salient ontological feature in the social life of tattoos and the tattooed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bruce was appointed to the Chair of Anthropology at UQ in 1975, moving to Brisbane with his wife Barbara Rigsby and their children Mark and Jan. Bruce's scholarly range was broad. Bruce Joseph Rigsby (1937-2022) was a fieldwork-oriented linguist and social anthropologist who maintained a lifelong connection with Native Americans of the Southern Plateau of the Pacific North-west, especially "Sahaptian vowel systems through time" and Nass-Gitksan peoples but others as well. Barbara's life/work balance held Bruce's work/work balance somewhat in check over many valiant years, and her care for Bruce in the years following his stroke was heroic. [Extracted from the article]

Migrants in 2020 stay connected with their homes in ways unimaginable just 10 years ago. In the case of the Australian Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) which facilitates the short term, repeat travel of Timorese to Australia to engage in harvest labour, this connectivity particularly pronounced and important. In this article, drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork in the household of a returned SWP worker in Oecussi, I argue that this connectivity is intense enough that it calls us to reassess what we mean by migration how we think about its impact on development. Rather than thinking of SWP participants as migrants, I argue, it may be more useful to think of them as 'trans‐national villagers' whose international labour encodes understandings of work and wealth that are essentially an extension of those prevailing in Timor and definitive in its impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On resisting plus ça change in the anthropology of religion When I was a student of archaeology and anthropology in Britain in the 1980s, the "problem" of change - how to identify it, how to account for it - was already an abiding theme in classrooms and conferences. The force of much of Joel Robbins' argument in I Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life i (Robbins, [26]) is based around the assumption that theological concepts are equipped to have a productively transformative influence on anthropological ones. That text includes further reflections on a long-standing preoccupation of Robbins, relating to how actors' categories can have an impact on analytic ones - thus partially echoing the double-hermeneutic but referring more directly to the influences of symbolic anthropology alongside Louis Dumont and Marilyn Strathern (Robbins, [26], pp. 16-17). [Extracted from the article]

New technologies open up the possibility of rapid social change the likes of which has not been seen since the appearance of anatomically modern humans: humanity being either substituted by or transformed into a new post‐human species. Such an unprecedented change is difficult to concretely imagine in advance of its occurrence because it would unfold in a heretofore unheralded manner, and due to the speed with which it might happen, the only real indication of being on the cusp of such an even might be 'affective indexes.' For various reasons, models based on either Christian apocalyptic literature, the post‐human academic turn, or science fiction are unreliable models of what these 'affective indexes' might be like. This essay explores whether horror literature in general and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, in particular, might serve as models of what such 'affective indexes' of such a transformation might be and suggests that senses of disjunctures in scale, of time being 'out of joint,' of disturbing problematizations of what constitutes the human, and of religious horror and the sublime may be ways that humanity might anticipate the unthinkable prospect of being replaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the religious movement known as Spiritualism, a medium's task is to provide evidence that there is no such thing as death. Human existence is defined by Spiritualists in terms of continual spiritual progress rather than stark beginnings and endings, although converts do tell vivid stories of the moment they realised Spiritualism's truth. The movement changed over decades as mediums turned their attention from physical to mental manifestations of spiritual presence. Mediumship has remained popular in public culture, but as an institution Spiritualism has declined in prominence to the point where many members of the movement now join it as converts and worry about the closure of churches. In this article, I juxtapose personal and institutional beginnings and endings to show their interrelation, with people's senses of radical newness and progress cultivated in the context of perceived institutional decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Pentecostal Christians seek repair and renewal in their lives, after their efforts to rupture with the past and become born again? In this article, I wish to consider the ways that a group of Nigerian Pentecostals who belong to a deliverance church re‐narrativise their lives by constructing and entering into new timelines of history after their attempts to break with the past. This discursive project works to insert a notion of 'Black Africa' into an authentically Christian historical chronology that stretches far back into the biblical past and forward to the eschaton. In this way, Africa's unique spiritual character is seen as reflected not only in its reasserted claim to Christian history, but also in its eschatologically driven destiny to re‐evangelise the world. This tells us something about the theological way these Christians reframe their role in history, including how their understanding of a collective past shapes their vision of who they are in the present and will be in the future. In this article, I argue that more attention needs to be given to processes of repair, repositioning and realignment in discussions about how conversion to Pentecostalism can generate efforts to break away from what becomes conceptualised as 'the past'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embrace of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 was not a given for evangelical voters. The thrice married, one‐time advocate for abortion, who prided himself on his ability to attract beautiful women did not seem like someone for whom evangelicals would enthusiastically show up to vote. Understanding the need to excite the tepid Evangelical base, evangelical leaders planned a meeting of 1000 pastors on 21 June 2016 in New York City. Mike Huckabee moderated this carefully planned question‐and‐answer interview with Donald J. Trump. Well‐known politically engaged evangelical pastors, including James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Tony Perkins and David Jeremiah, asked planted questions to which Donald J. Trump responded. I learned from ethnographic interviews with evangelical advisors to President Trump in 2020 that this meeting was the moment that they, and many other evangelical pastors, moved from scepticism to support of Donald J. Trump. In this article, I will analyse the 2016 meeting to understand how it helped propel Donald J. Trump into the White House. Specifically, I will use the lens of diffusion theory to understand how this meeting served as a rupture and tipping point of change for evangelical pastors' support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remainder of the Special Issue I speaks to i the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker by providing anthropological contexts and analyses of issues of immediate relevance to and raised by the shooting death: In her article, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel provides a perspective from Willowra, a neighbouring Warlpiri community to the north of Yuendumu. The facts of the situation up to that point were clear: In the early evening of Saturday, 9 November 2019, while some community members were still at the Yuendumu graveyard following the burial of a prominent community member (one of Kumunjayi's grandfathers), police officers attempted to apprehend 19-year-old Kumunjayi Walker at his grandmother's house ("Red House" hereafter). Keywords: Central Australia; fear; indigenous deaths in custody; police violence; settler-colonialism EN Central Australia fear indigenous deaths in custody police violence settler-colonialism 3 16 14 09/21/22 20220802 NES 220802 This is an introduction in three parts. Views tend to fall into one of two camps; one that views the shooting as an isolated incident during which Constable Rolfe acted professionally and correctly, and the other that holds that with the shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Red House, the murderousness of the settler colony was set loose in plain sight, in the middle of Yuendumu. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how the use of mobile phones and associated software creates and sustains regionally diverse urban communities. There is an interdependent connection between music that is highly participatory and locally relevant, and processes involved in sustaining key social relationships across a variety of groupings. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phones are used for musical purposes in ways that specifically put certain processes to work to sustain these social phenomena. This connects people with transnational software‐based commerce through social media, local telecommunications companies and phone manufacturers. That results in the navigation of ecologies and economies of data, hardware and software that work in local urban circumstances. In the case of data, we demonstrate how modes of exchange and reciprocity tied to social relationships exhibit similarities with informal economies of tobacco and betelnut. With social groups, the church‐based community perspective provides urban examples of communities that cross regions, and extended family networks. This ethnographic perspective shows how increasingly global technologies are used in urbanite Melanesia in ways that sustain longstanding values and practices, while also incorporating identities and associations around changing urban, national and international circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe and analyse graffiti arts and tags in the city of Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, a multicultural and multilingual city which is home to people who have moved from many different areas of New Caledonia and other countries of the South Pacific. I aim to understand how the citizens of Nouméa use graffiti and tags to construct their plural identities and identify themselves as Nouméens, as residents of Nouméan suburbs, and as people from other regions, with continued attachment and identification to these areas (tribal villages, islands, countries) of origin. How do they express these multiple senses of belonging? Which visual symbols, words, linguistic codes and norms do they use? How can this literacy help younger generations simultaneously reclaim their urban spaces ('I'm from here and elsewhere', 'I have my place in this city!') and assert their Oceanic identities? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that although Pacific arts began to be largely recognised in Australia in the 1990s, Pacific artists based in Australia remained mostly invisible in the contemporary art scene until the mid‐2000s. I aim to demonstrate how Pacific artists and curators—who in some cases collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and curators—have made visible myriad Pacific identities and social trajectories in Australian cities. Exhibitions reveal and highlight multiple experiences of Pacific people residing in Australia, for whom Pacific cultures are partly mediated by the experiences of their relatives, popularised by museum collections and coloured by the gaze of non‐Pacific people. This article is built around two cultural events that have not previously received scholarly attention, a group show curated in Sydney by Māori artist and cultural worker Keren Ruki and a triennial in Brisbane imagined and organised by Bundjalung Yugambeh (Aboriginal Australian) artist and curator Jenny Fraser. It addresses how narratives in the 2000s were often connected to objectives of empowerment and the necessity to build a future for Pacific peoples in Australian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residents of Gilbert Camp, an illegal settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, the capital city of Solomon Islands, recurrently declare that life in town is hard. However, they have been migrating there, they keep doing so notwithstanding great challenges, and create the conditions for others to settle too. The apparent contradiction between their ideas and behaviours is resolved by looking at their home‐making practices, and interpreting negative statements as commentaries. These commentaries evaluate their efforts to turn Honiara into a home and a place where they can live the "good" life. Home is not just a matter of urban belonging and place‐making, neither it is just a matter of surviving in the "hard" urban context; rather it is a complex negotiation between cultural priorities, the specific needs of local communities, and their commitment to create a home away from home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Koori Radio was founded in Redfern in 1993 as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander radio station. Its aim was to give a voice to these communities, acting as a counterpoint to their stereotyped representation in mainstream media and promoting their creative practices (especially music). Rather than 'thinking only Aboriginal', it has increasingly embraced the ongoing multicultural diversity of modern Sydney, as well as re‐articulating Aboriginality with transnational Indigeneity and Blackness. A Koori Radio worker explained this change as 'a Black thing of people of colour who have the same struggles and understand each other'. This approach has not been without controversy, with many activists calling for greater emphasis on Aboriginal identity and specific struggles. Ethnographic research at Koori Radio shows, however, that the connections made between different communities have enhanced, rather than diminished, the capacity of Koori Radio to fulfill its objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the 'locking up' of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south‐east Cape York conducted in 2018–2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non‐Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who 'know the intimacies of the soil', as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long‐term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non‐local 'Green' ideologies and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an anthropological perspective of violence to critique and interrogate the concept of social justice. It analyses Bangladeshi sex workers' "lived experience" of symbolic and structural violence in different social worlds—the community and family, and brothels—as a new framework for understanding social injustice. We find that violence and injustice exist in a complex web of power, identity, social structures and culture, shaped by power relations, discriminating social structures, and oppressive cultural norms which push the sex workers into the cycles of violence. These forms of violence impede an individual's capabilities, life chances and dignity, the factors that determine one's experience of social justice. From a social policy perspective, our study suggests that social justice to sex workers concerns, first and foremost, with addressing their needs for safety and security, thus, enabling them to experience equity, dignity, protection and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Australian partner visa application process, as experienced by African‐Australian couples in intimate heterosexual relationships. In Australia, similar to other Anglo‐European countries, the visa application process is an increasingly complex procedure. In order to avoid sham marriages that are entered into for the sole purpose of obtaining residency, it heavily scrutinises couples' relationships and motives for marriage migration. This article explores marriage migration 'from below', by looking at how the Australian Government utilises the idea of 'genuineness' in order to establish the sincere character of binational relationships, and in turn, how this bureaucratic focus affects couples and their intimate relationships. I argue that the visa application process is distrusting of binational couples, which produces various outcomes: it obstructs intimacy and romance as experienced by couples; rather than fostering equality as desired by the Government, it generates a dependency among couples whereby female sponsoring spouses are ascribed more power than their foreign partners; and the non‐transparent and lengthy procedure, as a form of structural violence against binational couples, affects couples' ontological security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Siargao Island, as elsewhere in the Philippines, women who enter into intimate relationships with Western men can attain economic capital, global opportunities and social mobility through their partners. On Siargao Island, local women who surf differentiate themselves from imaginings of 'other' Filipinas by emphasising their relationships with Western men as being 'for love' not money. Nevertheless, the economic benefits that can accrue to local women in transnational relationships is observable. However, through identification with surf culture, women who surf possess a global social capital and transnational networks that extend beyond their Western partners, and which alter the dynamics of these relationships in the women's favour. Further, local women's social mobility and adherence to the 'surfer girl' identity creates a space in which they are implicitly challenging colonial and class‐based beauty ideals in the Philippines that privilege fair or light skin over darker skin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bandung is bustling with the activities of young people organised in komunitas. These social formations display a striking variety in terms of size, coherence, activity, mediatisation, institutional background, internal hierarchies, gender and age composition. Despite this heterogeneity, they capitalise on similar values, like peer solidarity, creativity or friendship. By attending to the formation of specific groups—so called komunitas perdamaian, literally peace communities—I pursue a genealogy of Bandung's komunitas, seeking to uncover the social and discursive evolution of this phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic data from 1‐year of fieldwork in Bandung, I argue that there are at least four variants of komunitas that became salient in distinct historical moments informing the ways these social formations are signified today: (a) punk/indie collectives that produced the style of the 1998 reform movement; (b) groups of young entrepreneurs that popularised creativity as Bandung's trademark in the 2000s; and (more recently) (c) Islamic proselytisation; and (d) peace movements, both of which epitomise creativity and solidarity, yet on different scales and to different ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Nepal 'development' (bikas) frames local socio‐cultural practices, including gendered and environmental practices, with lasting gendered and ecological outcomes. This tension is at the heart of everyday life in Ludigaun, a Bahun (high caste Hindu) village in West Nepal. Utilising a framework of a local familiar tension between 'traditional' ideas/practices and those imagined through 'modernity', I draw on ethnographic material describing a year‐long family conflict over keeping buffalo, to allow the tension and contradictions inherent in village life – of gender, generations, and caste – and their articulation with national and global relations – to come into focus. For an older generation of women, their work and relationships with buffalo are at stake, presenting an uncertain future and a possible crisis of identity and of place. I argue that the relationship between these women and their buffalo extends beyond material needs and is a crucial emotional attachment; it is an intimate 'mode of care' that is integral to village social reproduction. Women's work with buffalo (although it has no positive status of its own) demonstrates the older generation of women are not passive but active players in constituting caste, gendered and social status identities. Keeping buffalo is fundamental to the ways in which and older generation of Bahun women exert their influence. Building on the work of Campbell (Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Intimacies, 2005b, pp. 79–100; Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture and Power in the Himalayas, 2013), Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, 2015), Harraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016) and Govindrajan (Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas, 2018), the human–buffalo relationship presented here demonstrates the human–animal relationship as a key relationship of value to Bahun women at a time when the out‐migration phenomenon has taken their children away. I argue that in this way, and at a time when human–environment relationships are increasingly disembedded, human–buffalo relationships in West Nepal emphasise a unity between humans and their environment and remind us that intimacy and becoming are multispecies affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]