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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]

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]

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]

This paper describes a safehouse project for survivors of witchcraft accusations that has been initiated by people of the Hewa‐speaking community located in the Papua New Guinea highlands. Belief in witchcraft and the killing of accused witches has a long cultural history among Hewa people, where it was formerly part of intergroup conflict and patterns of dominance and retribution. Contemporary Hewa witch killing often involves the use of torture and the targeting of children and infants, although these have no historical precedent. The safehouse has been established inside the community itself. Locating the safehouse where accusations and killing are taking place is a deliberate strategy to change the belief system that supports the identification and killing of accused witches. This model also ensures that people do not become internally displaced when they flee their accusers. The safehouse is designed to be self‐sufficient so that is does not become reliant on aid from external organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the ‘homecoming’ experiences of young second‐ and third‐generation Australian‐Hungarians. The aim of the paper is to challenge the compartmentalisation of tourism and migration studies by exploring how these two phenomena intertwine, merge, and influence one another in multiple and fluid ways. Specifically, I attempt to merge the two disciplines by analysing the meta‐narratives that have influenced Australian‐Hungarian youngsters' experiences in Hungary. In particular, I argue that, alongside images internalised in the diaspora, interlocutors heavily rely on a popular Western backpacker discourse. I demonstrate the ways in which these two meta‐narratives are in conflict while at the same time closely inter‐related. Specifically, I look at the ways in which the notion of authenticity and the idea of ‘traveller hierarchy’ are borrowed from backpacker discourse, and through them diasporic themes are targeted and deconstructed. I refer to these youngsters as ‘diaspora backpackers’ to indicate that their journeys are influenced by both diaspora life and contemporary youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines wine drinking among English and Australian women to discover and analyse the connection between their consumption of wine and their experiences, thoughts and imaginings. Comparing the experiences of women from the English town of Halifax with women from the southern suburbs of Adelaide and McLaren Vale (South Australia), I show how imbibing wine enables both groups of women to consume place, space and time, thus extending a liminal experience. Importantly, both groups of women engage with notions of national or regional identity. However, whereas English women typically experience wine drinking as a temporal engagement of social imagination involving a form of armchair alco‐tourism, Australian women mostly engage their social memory, and experience wine drinking as embedded within imagined communities of belonging. As such, this study demonstrates that wine drinking is not just gendered, but a complex, culturally situated practice and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more‐than‐human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals, explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. This paper takes inspiration from Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter, and philosophical thoughts of a 12th‐century Muslim mystic poet, Farid ud‐Din Attar, to examine how becoming‐with pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds, develop entrenched companionship and shape their social choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of 'atmosphere' will be employed to frame an ethnographic analysis of two facets of pigdogging. First, by hunting with a dog, humans augment their capacity to identify the presence of pigs through the canine's extraordinary sense of scent. Through this relationship, the world of scent is revealed as having atmospheric properties: an enveloping phenomenon which is known through the dog, yet also escapes the hunter's perceptual apprehension. Second, this paper will illustrate examples of how atmosphere develops through the sensual relations between human and nonhuman bodies during the hunt. An affectively charged interspecies encounter is composed and participated in by the hunter through this recreational practice, and affords the enactment of subjectivities central to an aesthetics of pigdogging. Hunting atmospheres in this paper emerge at the juncture of human and more‐than‐human bodies, perspectives and worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the 'arts of noticing' (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of more‐than‐human engagement, connection and relatedness. Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology and beyond, we ask how becoming‐with more‐than‐humans helps us to construct a post‐humanist analysis in the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields, the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity to think about animals as subjects, through our ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way through interspecies knowledge‐making. [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]

This paper explores the interweaving of Buddhist practice, old age and women's gendered roles in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Given Vietnamese gendered norms that emphasise women's lifelong attachment and responsiblity to their families, this paper shows that Buddhist practice is a way of life in old age for women. Old age is a time in life when one continues to hone relational personhood and negotiate between gendered roles at home and individual self‐cultivating practice. Inspired by Sarah Lamb's (White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2000) discussion on entanglement and disentanglement in West Bengali women's old age, this paper shows that Vietnamese women draw on the Buddhist notion of 'karmic debt' to define the boundary of their household duties. With the Buddhist Way, old age is not merely a continuing devotion to the family, it is a time marked by both self‐ and family‐nurturing. [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]

This introduction places the papers of this Special Issue within the context of a brief overview of previous literature on the subject of masculinities in the Pacific, and especially of Melanesia. The particular focus on Melanesia is discussed in terms of the colloquia from which the papers originated and is also linked to a discussion of the regionalism of applied social science in Australia. In acknowledging the current link between academic research into gender and the aid and development industries, this introduction critically discusses how understandings of Pacific men and masculinities have presented a 'problem' to both of these areas. Indeed, while assessing particular instances in the changing situation of Pacific men's lives, the papers in this Issue also provide a timely critique of the shared dilemmas of anthropology and development within the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranging from colonial modernism to postcolonial disappointment, the papers in this collection explore the possibilities of Dark Anthropology and an Anthropology of the Good in Papua New Guinea. With these two prospects in mind, I consider what these papers tell us about the situations of rural people on the peripheries of large resource projects and those in 'Last Places' bypassed by development and the State. In all of these cases, difficult predicaments entail hardship or suffering, but are also met with responses seeking to realise varying versions of the good. This, in turn, prompts further questions about which and whose good are at issue amid a plurality of values. I conclude by suggesting that the ensemble of papers offers a retrospective on local versions of modernity as possibility contends with experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of vulnerability are most often seen in the anthropology of disaster studies, where socio‐economic and political inequalities produce environmental vulnerabilities, and the people situated in these locations are positioned as vulnerable and dependent 'Others'. Rather than reproduce vulnerability as a concept denoting weakness, this paper seeks to examine the generative capacities of vulnerability practised in parallel in ethnographic and community spaces. As a form of witnessing and participating in and out of differing social worlds, anthropology engages in different vulnerabilities with and between multiple actors. This paper examines how a community program working with families identified as 'disadvantaged' in South Australia strategically uses vulnerability as a productive resource and a practice of care. In theorising vulnerability through parallel practices in both ethnographic approaches and this community program, we argue that vulnerability can be leveraged away from negative welfare discourses towards alternative politics of radical care and social change. [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]

Concern with climate change, and coal's contribution to it, has centred coal in an intensely moralised politics of accusation in Australia. This paper discusses the ordinary ethics through which pro‐coal lobbyists in Australia relate to this moralised landscape and offers an analysis of the everyday and ordinary production of complicity with climate change. It argues that complicity is not just something that insufficiently ethical people engage in, but instead highlights the ways in which the coal industry derives a moral weight for its defenders. This complicity is made and reproduced precisely through the everyday practices of ethical deliberation figured in response to interpersonal moral accusations. These insights are made possible through the author's own positionality and surprising affinities with pro‐coal lobbyists, and thus this paper argues for an anthropology of extractive industry which embraces the interplay of anthropological rapport with complicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers discussed within the issue related to ethnography and the interpretation of Cronulla, including "They Always Seem to be Angry" by Andrew Lattas, a paper clarifying the contrasting views of Australian society on political philosophy and ethnography by Judy Lattas and another exploring the construction of desire around transgression by Anthony Redmond.

Anthropology has often been handmaiden to administrative and political activity that requires bounded social groups mapped onto territories and possessing defining characteristics such as language, values and behaviours. This introductory essay sets the scene for the papers in this Issue which show that actual sets of social relations in their particular places cannot easily be made to conform with this hermetic construct. Acknowledging this, post-colonial theory has been driven to theorise borderlands, hybridisation and metissage, liminal and interstitial social spaces. Yet these necessarily reinforce and privilege primary concepts of the pure and the central, the bounded and situated. This paper places the hermetic view of culture in its formative period, which also saw the emergence of nationalism and scientific atomism. The paper proposes that positing pure and bounded cultures, even as an idealised abstraction, is an error of theory which is influenced by an attachment to metaphors of the material world, usually 'Euclidean'. Finally, the paper explores ways that analyses of cultural interrelation, such as those in this Special Issue, can proceed without imagining a resulting 'culture', and what this may do for the political landscape of localised cultural rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a small Bahun village in Gorkha district, West Nepal, in only one generation, there has been a huge shift to educating young women and including them in modernity. Ideologies of 'gender equality' in education that are promoted in development programs and discourse, and in Maoist rhetoric, have been powerful drivers behind this. In this paper I highlight the gender and generational dynamics of the changing relationship of women to education in Nepal. I argue that the move to educating women is not a simple one, nor is it necessarily a development success story. The importance placed on educating the younger generation, including women, is also very much tied to local Bahun culture, marriage values and status. Bahun villagers of Ludigaun place great importance on both education and marriage. When combined, I argue, education has in fact become dowry. While there have been transformations in education and other modernising processes, as well as in dowry practices, in this paper I show that they have come to maintain traditional hierarchies and to support the status making of the educated Bahun man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an interesting discussion and analysis of Pasifika (specifically Tongan and Samoan) migrants in Brisbane, and the diverse adaptive cultural practices they use to promote a sense of wellbeing and cultural continuity in diaspora contexts. Pacific Island migrant perspectives of wellbeing and worldviews are linked to their spatial behaviour and material cultural adaptations within places like Brisbane. The characteristics of the Brisbane urban landscape create the material cultural adaptations that have been observed in diaspora contexts, including places of dwelling, community and church gatherings. They are commonly displayed during family or community events, in both private and public spaces. In order to understand the significance of material cultural adaptations we must also consider the underpinnings of the materials and templates used within context. Preliminary qualitative findings have been drawn from a wider‐scale research project that has explored Pasifika migrants (of Samoan and Tongan descent) perceptions and experiences of wellbeing during 2015‒2018. This inquiry has rendered significant evidence of cultural values and identity elements originating from Samoa and Tonga and retained by generations of Brisbane‐based Pacific Islanders, through adapted material culture and shared spatial behaviour. [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 analyses the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency or competence (or lack thereof) on the data collection process during fieldwork and subsequent analysis. We focus on researcher interaction with the field in a largely monolingual setting in Japan, and the multilingual setting of an international school in Indonesia. Researcher positionality during fieldwork shifts with their (perceived) linguistic fluency, which in turn affects the data. Despite the emphasis on reflexive ethnography, anthropological research rarely interrogates the impact of the researcher's linguistic fluency on the field. We attribute this silence to the perception that highlighting researcher language ability may compromise their ethnographic authority. In this paper we use self-reflexivity to make visible the ethnographic impact that the researcher's language ability has on fieldwork processes. We argue that being self-reflexive about our linguistic fluency, or lack thereof, does not necessarily compromise our analysis. [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]

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]

Idealistically speaking, schools are engines for upward social mobility. Education for ethnic minorities in Laos was set up to achieve nationalist, political, economic and sociocultural goals of 'equity' and 'equality'. It was hoped that education would shift ethnic minorities from a lifestyle based on superstitious beliefs to a modern one, so that they could participate and enjoy 'equality' through educational equity. The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of how equality as a promise in education has impacted on students' upward mobility, particularly the political discourse of the 'big man'. This paper explores social mobility provided by national education for ethnic minorities through boarding schooling. It finds that such education has yet to reposition ethnic minorities into the ethnic Lao sociocultural hierarchy. As a result, regardless of their educational success, students are still ranked as 'ethnic minorities' and as being 'poor' in the eyes of urban students, middle class and rich students, and the ethnic Lao elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of 'dark anthropology': that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins (), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of 'anthropologies of the good,' which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental anthropology is an expanding field in Australia. Extensive research on Aboriginal relationships to land and natural resources has provided the foundation for growing anthropological interest in the interactions of other Australians with the biophysical environments they inhabit. Australian-based anthropologists also continue to contribute to research on environmental beliefs and practices in other parts of the world. This paper provides a brief overview of previously explored themes in this field as a precursor to introducing new research and proposing additional areas of research. It is suggested that these could be usefully developed to enhance anthropological contributions to debates about environmental change in Australia and surrounding regions. We argue that there are roles for anthropologists as 'cultural translators' in cross-disciplinary engagements with environmental scientists and natural resource managers; as cultural theorists skilled at documenting and interpreting changing environmental attitudes; and as environmental advocates pursuing the knowledge needed to create more ecologically sustainable human communities. We also suggest that Australian anthropologies of the environment can make valuable theoretical and ethnographic contributions to this important international field of study. [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]

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 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]

In this paper I connect an anthropology of Christianity to an anthropology of the body and an anthropology of the nation. I try to achieve this by looking at changing notions of femininity in the Pentecostal context of Vanuatu. I do this on two different levels; on the one hand I show how the meaning of womanhood is changed in what I call the 'pentecostalised' neighborhoods of the capital Port Vila, and on the other I show how the household and the nation become contexts into which this new notion of femininity is played. Thus, in the first part of the paper I look at the ways in which Pentecostal Christianity change the meaning of gender, whereas in the second part of the paper I look at how this new form of gendered meaning has relevance for our understanding of wider social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Japanese society the ability to care for oneself and other senior citizens has become a defining feature of good retirement. The capitalist Japanese state has historically mobilised moral virtues to foster a sense of productive citizenship among senior citizens and their family members. After the country failed to recover from the long recessionary era, policies regarding the welfare of senior citizens have shifted, from a focus on familial care to an emphasis on individual responsibility. This paper traces these shifts in moral virtues since the 1970s to elucidate how ideas of ‘independence’ and ‘mutual support’ have become persuasive forms of virtue for senior citizens, particularly retired corporate workers, in the current neoliberal climate. The paper will also draw from my recent fieldwork among elderly Japanese to contrast their experiences with the state's expectations. The independent and mutually supportive retirement as a performative cultural production was often experienced as one of intense dislocation, rather than belonging, in a productivist state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the Japanese inhabitants of a densely populated urban neighbourhood negotiate proximity and distance in their social relationships. Based on ethnography of a community salon in the city of Osaka, the paper explores how topics and styles of conversation, modes of interaction between salon‐goers, are constituted with respect to a pervasive concern for manners and for the emotions of others. Focusing on the importance of ‘form’ and its relevance for morality, I argue that formality serves as an enabling device for creating new relationships among older Japanese, preserving sociality while protecting oneself and others from the burdens of emotion and excessive proximity. By focusing on the ethics of ‘doing things properly’ (chanto suru) I explore the relationship of manners and care. By taking manners into account, I turn my attention in this article to those relationships crafted and maintained amongst those to whom one is not very close, and with whom one may not wish to become intimate. In this way I explore the question of how to treat well those towards whom one wishes to maintain distance: in other words, how to care for those who are not one's friends? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the over‐representation of Australian Indigenous women in the criminal justice system, culturally relevant and gender‐specific bail programs operate in several Queensland Indigenous sentencing courts or Murri Courts. Queensland Murri Courts are a specialist criminal law practice, which includes Elders and respected persons of Community Justice Groups in the sentencing process of Indigenous peoples. This paper explores the role of one gender‐specific bail program, Women's Yarning or Talking Circles, in one Southeast Queensland Murri Court. Women's Yarning Circles aspire to create an Indigenous‐centred space outside of court proceedings where defendants and Community Justice Group members of the same gender can build a rapport. Gender‐specific bail programs aim to recognise the intricacies of an Indigenous woman's intersectional identity and the diverse needs of each defendant that comes before the Murri Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from ethnographic research on entertainment television in the Philippines, in which poverty, suffering, abundance and joy are materialised and enacted as central themes. Examples are considered from a particularly successful Philippine television program, Eat Bulaga, in which audience members compete to win prizes of cash, bank accounts, feasts, appliances or vehicles. While the production of this television program creates a wider, mediated representation of poverty and abundance, suffering and joy, the paper focuses on the practices and experiences of the people – including production staff and audience members ‐ whose participation in the making of this television program is a materially, and at times spiritually, transformative event. In doing so, Eat Bulaga consolidates and remediates a large market of television audiences whose self‐understanding incorporates the mass consumption of particular goods as being central to the Philippine experience of poverty‐in‐modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology is now developing and using ethnography to research uses and experiences of digital communication technology (including mobile phones, the internet and software), in and across many different cultures and societies. Ethnography enables a focus on the complex intertwining of society, culture and technology allowing us to see how technologies are being transformed by existing modes of life, while simultaneously having a 'messy' influence over those lives, resulting in what are often unexpected consequences. This special issue discusses the use of mobile phones in Papua New Guinea and along the borders of Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the mixture of phone and internet usage in Central Australia and among the Tongan diaspora in Melbourne; the use of internet based video translation practices focused on West Papuan politics; and the disorder produced by software in work environments in Australia. Collectively, these papers help us to reimagine ethnography and challenge conventional theorising of technology by allowing us to discuss the relationships between communication and power in diverse contexts, opening up opportunities for us to engage with and explore the significance of both order and disorder in technologically mediated social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In remote Indigenous communities, people with end stage kidney disease have limited access to dialysis services and the vast majority of patients contend with urban displacement in order to access treatment. Through ethnographic encounters with Yolŋu renal patients and other actors in Northern Territory healthcare systems, this paper explores how the threats posed by end stage kidney disease are multiply conceptualised and imbued with different forms of moral and political value. Drawing on Mary Douglas' cultural theory of risk, I consider how Yolŋu, health professionals and health policymakers construct topographies of safety and danger. I argue that medical risk is deployed in Northern Territory healthcare systems to perform the 'dirty work' of governing uncertainties and threats to renal patients' health and of distributing treatment amongst patients and over space. The 'dirty work' of medical risk recasts questions of value and the distribution of resources into matters of safety and liability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Athol Chase was an anthropologist committed to the benefits of cross-disciplinary research. His thesis was influenced considerably by his supervisor John von Sturmer (Chase and von Sturmer, 1973), who subsequently facilitated Athol's initial engagements with Aboriginal communities in Cape York Peninsula. His co-authored paper with plant ecologist Ross Hynes (Hynes and Chase, 1982; see also Chase, 1989) introduced a significant and original theorisation of plant usage in Cape York Peninsula. With colleague David Thompson, he continued to produce commissioned anthropological work for native title cases, until and after his retirement from formal university employment in 2001 (e.g. Chase and Thompson, 2004; Thompson and Chase, 2014). [Extracted from the article]

The Pacific Island region is a key context in the history of anthropology. Yet, while much has been written about how anthropology of the Pacific Islands contributed to Anglo‐American anthropology, the discipline's institutional history in the Pacific Islands has received very little attention. This paper is the first to explore the history of anthropology at the University of the South Pacific (USP). Research findings demonstrate that anthropology lacked practical meaning in an institution established to modernise Pacific Island states. Fieldwork conducted at USP suggests that current perceptions of anthropology held by academic staff are strongly linked to the discipline's classic era. I argue that the anti‐colonial version of the Pacific Way from the 1970s onward, coupled with the hegemony of political economist and anti‐culturalist approaches among the USP teaching staff in the 1980s, inhibited a meaningful engagement with the Writing Culture debate at USP. This may explain why there has been little influence by the discipline's postmodern transformation over the past thirty years on current perceptions of anthropology at USP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An indelible memory of visitors to Willowra Aboriginal community in Central Australia is the sound of donkeys braying as they roam the village in search of sustenance and are chased by barking dogs. While Warlpiri people view donkeys as an integral part of their sonic landscape, outsiders typically perceive the animals as a noisy, land‐management 'pest' and want them removed. Recently, the arrival of a stranger in a truck towing a donkey trailer provoked concerned discussion. Talk intensified when, for a few days, the donkeys disappeared, and the silence of the donkeys echoed throughout the community. Tracing emergent social relations and mimetic connections that entangle donkeys and people in the Willowra region, this paper explores why donkeys matter to local Warlpiri, sensorially and otherwise. I contrast Warlpiri coexistence with donkeys to the treatment of donkeys by conservationists as feral animal and by capitalists as commodity. Linking the silence of donkeys at Willowra to the global trade in ejiao, a glue made from donkey hides used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics, I engage with Michael Taussig's (2019) 'The cry of the burro [donkey]' to examine differing senses of being and predicaments that the sound of donkeys evoke cross‐culturally. I conclude with a call to listen differently to other‐than‐human beings when considering multispecies assemblages. Attending to the sonic range of donkeys as an expression of their agency, I suggest that we learn from Warlpiri and heed the cries of donkeys and their global silencing if we are to ensure our mutual survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a story about the 'arts of noticing' more‐than‐human noticing. In it I reflect on the ways in which my own practice of ethnographic filmmaking is itself an agent of multisensory participation. As artifice and artificial eye, there is something both liberating and sensuous about filmmaking practice. It heightens the performativity of participants and their embodied rituals and allows me to enter intimate spaces I would otherwise not encounter. In these encounters a deep multispecies noticing takes place, although in the first instance this is usually only by the camera. The intimacy enabled in these artificial but sensorial encounters can be both revealing and confronting, especially in cases of animal sacrifice. Re‐encountering footage filmed across years of research‐led endeavour, in this paper I explore the power of film to convey these multisensory and multispecies stories, as well as to evoke understanding and engage the multisensory memory of the filmmaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]