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The article focuses on the use of the tensor concept in ethnographic analysis. Topics include the limitations of applying algebraic tensors to cultural studies, the misapplication of the concept of endogeneity in African cultural change, and the relationship between structuralism and ethnographic data, especially in the context of state forms and societal organization.

Human mobility is perpetuated at the intersection of opportunity and pressure. In this photographic essay, I explore reverberations of movement from the Arctic to East Africa, where I have done ethnographic fieldwork or passed through on my own anthropological and personal journey. The photos compare continuities of movement for transborder Skolt Sámi communities in Fennoscandia, sedentarized East African hunters, West African migrants in Madrid, and my own transnational movement. I show that just as the camera works by reflecting an image, the movement of the anthropologist intersects with interlocutor mobilities to reveal global inequalities of movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines global agrifood chains from a perspective that links economic activity to sociocultural transformations in the social sphere—often categorized as private and independent of the economic domain. Specifically, the study examines the relations established between recruitment policies, work, and sexuality in the intensive cultivation of strawberries in Andalusia, Spain. Taking a feminist political economy and intersectional approach, the ethnographic analysis centers on sexuality in socio-labor spaces in the context of the policies to recruit quotas of women from their home countries on temporary contracts. The analysis starts by exploring the way that the changing recruitment criteria of the Spanish temporary farmworker program define the ideal woman worker and how sexuality is constructed in social representations and relations. The analysis then shows how the sexualization of temporary women workers from eastern Europe is constructed through comparisons of the various groups of workers (Polish, Romanian, Romani, Moroccan, and Andalusian). In the final section, the study examines the articulation of contradictory representations of sexuality and behavior with systems of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disability is a concept that grows as we think about it, forcing us to adjust our conversations in vocabulary and rhetoric depending on which disability world we inhabit or address. Understanding disability starts with exposure to disabled people's bodyminds in their own spacetime and an appreciation of disability expertise. The disability justice movement pulls the intersectional performance of disability out of the intimate sphere so that it can play a role in policy, an analytic where anthropology should shine. This article is particularly addressed to anthropologists with a new interest in disability and critical disability studies scholars with a frustration with anthropology. I use exemplary analysis of actual dialogues drawn from an autoethnographic record of my own perceived mobility and speech impairments to explore my biopolitical positioning as disabled. Anthropologists have the capacity to move disability theory forward, feeding it with ethnographic fuel. While the anthropology of disability uses insightful ethnographic methods to understand specific impairments in specific contexts, the reflexive turn in anthropology has not yet embraced disability. We are still better off remaining individual disability experts; our collective efforts are still an "embarrassment to power." This article, as part of a collective special issue, aims to change that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the critical disability theory of affordances that I have been developing through ethnographic inquiries and the notion of "microactivist affordances," by which I mean micro and everyday acts of world building with which disabled people literally make up, and at the same time make up for, whatever affordance fails to readily materialize in their environments. Drawing from fieldwork in Turkey and Quebec with people who have chronic pain and mobility-related disabilities, I explore how microactivist affordances emerge, not through the complementarity of a single perceiver and the world but through the complementarity of multiple perceivers and the world, within the particular material conditions of living with disability. Taking into account the sociality of my interlocutors' microactivist affordances and their, after Ginsburg and Rapp, "disability worlds," I propose the notion of "people as affordances" as a way to describe how people can enable the emergence of, or directly become, affordances for one another, especially where no other affordances exist. I then explore the various forms that "people as affordances" may take and that allow people to create access by their own means, and the socialities within which that access creation may—or may fail to—materialize. Finally, I suggest that "people as affordances" can provide new ways of understanding care that I, after Mia Mingus's work, conceptualize as "care intimacy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces "ethnographic metacommentary," an experiential, processual, and protracted approach to ethnography. My proposed method goes beyond stating complexity as the defining characteristic of an anthropological project, visual or otherwise. To demonstrate the method, I write an ethnographic metacommentary of my 3-minute film Performing Naturalness (2008), which is about the surveillance of foreigners in Tokyo. A number of contexts on the film are explored—the political situation from which it arose, the background of the experiment chosen for the project, and genealogies of art practice. The method includes the process of "furtherings"—self-reflexive explorations that unpack aspects of the project that often retreat from anthropological ethnography. Overall, in the process of writing this ethnographic metacommentary, this article explores the nuanced experiences of Filipinos in transnational migration, contributes to the conversation on contemporary Philippine conceptual art and its relationship with anthropology and film/art practice, and fleshes out difficulties of representation in collaborative projects due to differences in intentions and locatedness. I show how ethnographic metacommentary is a productive thought process that fleshes out ruptures in the filmmaking process that are often concealed from the audience, and even from the filmmakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops three ethnographic scenes in Hong Kong reflecting three narratives of pandemic influenza as a side effect of the livestock revolution: an expert's view of the Hong Kong territory as a sentinel post on the edge of the epicenter for pandemic flu, a farmer's view of Hong Kong as a colonial experimentation on ways to raise chickens industrially, and a bird-watcher's view of Hong Kong as a place full of bird spirits. In these different settings, I contrast the logic of indicators with the logic of sentinels and ask what it means to release a bird on the threshold of domestication, considered not as an evolutionary step but as a space of friction where humans and birds enter into an uncertain interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the moral content and epistemological utility of scholar-informant solidarity in ethnography. It supports efforts to highlight the potential for immoral outcomes when ethnographers prioritize the interests of those they study during the conception, execution, and dissemination of their work. However, this article advocates reinforcing the imperative of scholar-informant solidarity, recognizing the practice as morally compromised but epistemologically indispensable. I illustrate these claims by referencing my experiences as an ethnographer of white nationalist groups in the Nordic countries. In three case studies, I show how solidarity—and with it collaboration, reciprocity, and advocacy—led to troubling contributions to political causes while offering ethnographic knowledge unlikely to be gained through other forms of research. The article argues further that, while the moral and epistemic consequences of solidarity are exposed in the study of oppressive and violent groups, the potential for power asymmetries and political conflict among scholars and informants is ubiquitous. Therefore, the article addresses the need to embrace solidarity and the immorality that comes with it to ethnographers at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a significant interpretive issue for prehistoric archaeology: distinguishing adult ritual actions from the activities of children in the archaeological record. Through examining ethnographic accounts of recent huntergatherer children and reconsidering archaeological patterns and assemblages in light of these data, we explore how the results of children's play can be--and likely have been--misinterpreted by archaeologists as evidence for adult ritual behavior in prehistoric contexts. Given that children were a significant component of past hunter-gatherer (and other) societies, the fact that the material components of their activities overlap tremendously with items used in adult rituals must be routinely considered by archaeologists if we are to reconstruct robust understandings of past peoples all over the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioarchaeology provides sophisticated techniques for estimating intra- and intercemetery biological relationships (i.e., biodistances), which can significantly expand anthropological research on kinship, explaining multiple dimensions of social life and identity in prehistory. However, some assumptions guiding the interpretation of results may need reconsideration. Although it is often assumed that descent groups should be homogeneous, social organizational and marriage practices actually produce heterogeneity within descent groups. Interpretations of postmarital residence typically assume that spouses are buried together in the same cemetery, whereas cross-cultural ethnographic patterns suggest that postmortem location does not universally follow residence. Nevertheless, cross-cultural data do indicate that postmortem location is generally predictable by type of descent group and whether membership with natal groups is maintained or transferred upon marriage. These issues are discussed, leading to alternative models on intra- and intercemetery biodistance expectations for matrilineal descent groups, for patrilineal descent groups with and without wives' membership transfers, and for a range of smaller groups under bilateral descent. The influence of common marriage alliance systems on intra- and intergroup phenotypic heterogeneity versus homogeneity are also described. The proposed biodistance expectations for interpreting different kinship and marriage strategies may better position bioarchaeologists to engage other subfields and make substantial contributions to kinship research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a brief post-Cold War moment, it seemed as if global division would yield to connectivity as marginal regions would be rewired into the world economy. Instead, the post-9/11 years have seen the spread of ever-larger "no-go zones," seen as constituting a danger especially to Western states and citizens. Contact points are reduced as aid workers withdraw, military operations are conducted from above, and few visitors, reporters, or researchers dare venture beyond the new red lines. Casting an eye on this development while building on anthropology's critical security agenda, this article draws an ethnographic map of "global danger" by showing how perceived transnational threats-- terrorism, drugs, and displacement--are conjured, bundled, and relegated to world margins, from the sub-Saharan Sahel to the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Mali, it shows how a relationship by remote control has developed as Western interveners seek to overcome a fundamental dilemma: their deep concern with threats emanating from the danger zone set against their aversion toward entering it. As ambivalent sites of distance and engagement, I argue, such zones are becoming invested with old fantasies of remoteness and otherness, simultaneously kept at arm's length and unevenly incorporated into a world economy of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to the recently reemerged discussion of ethical ethnographic research by exposing and analyzing interrelated ethical, epistemological, and methodological dilemmas encountered in my ethnographic study of single-mother child protection families in the Netherlands. Systematically applying the current American Anthropological Association's ethical principles to my research and using one particular day of fieldwork as an example, I illustrate that these anticipatory principles inadequately address emergent ethical dilemmas, as six core dimensions of ethnographic research ethics and integrity often still conflict with one another. Hence, I argue that the current AAA's principles do not take into account that ethnographic research is simultaneously immersed in a dynamic context of relations and power hierarchies, embedded in theoretical reflexivity, and instrumentalized through the embodied subjectivity of the ethnographer. I draw lessons for a constructive discussion on how to deal with ethical concerns in ethnographic research by starting from ethnographic practice to expose, discuss, and critically engage with ethical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider the problems and advantages of combining the traditional subdisciplines of anthropology, especially the problem of combining studies that attempt to interpret and represent the "from the inside" point of view of a particular group of people, a practice typical of ethnography, with the more scientific approach that ultimately attempts to study our species and its evolution, inevitably "from the outside" of the particular point of view of any culture or society. I focus on imagination. Imagination "from the outside" seems a feature of human cognition, but a particular use of this capacity means that human beings can create apparently stable institutional structures. "From the inside," the idea that the social system, which in the case considered by and large equals the kinship system, is imaginary would seem false. Yet if we look at the representations we find in rituals such as initiation or ideas about incest, we find locals' ideas not at all incommensurate with those of the scientists. Again, if we look at the scientists' understanding of what motivates people in specific places, we find that they need to imagine a "from the inside" environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I draw upon over two years of fieldwork in a Garifuna community in Tela Bay, Honduras, to explore the ethical and political contradictions bound up with activist-oriented ethnographic research. The rise of tourism as a means of national development and a driver of local economic desires has fractured communal politics in Triunfo de la Cruz, particularly around questions pertaining to land tenure and territorial belonging. I analyze the challenges of doing politically engaged anthropology in such a context. My open collaboration with land rights activists and ongoing support for the struggle to defend Garifuna collective property rights initiated me into a moral community with the "defensores de la tierra" (defenders of the land). For these communal actors, I was first and foremost an ally, and my academic pursuits were secondary--or at best complimentary--to the exigencies of the political project I was working to support. Significantly, my alignment with land rights activists placed me in awkward tension with positivist approaches to social science research and with members of the opposing communal faction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How could Franz Boas, trained in physics and geography in Bismarck's Germany, carry any weight for twenty-first century anthropology, given the theoretical upheavals of the past few decades? As early as 1887, I argue, Boas foreshadowed certain theoretical innovations of recent years, especially Bruno Latour's ethnographic and philosophical analysis of science and modern society. My thesis is that Latourian and Boasian anthropologies are surprisingly alike, first in their rejection of "purified" high-modernist imagery, but more distinctively in their development of an ontologically "reckless" approach that traces the interwoven pathways of humans and nonhumans. Latour's resonance with Boas has less to do with any direct Boasian influence on his thinking than with their parallel alignments against the same hegemonic rationalism, which reached its climax in the long century of high modernism (ca. 1880-1990). At the same time, I argue, Latour and Boas are sharply contrasting in their treatment of elite or esoteric doctrines as opposed to general or exoteric culture. This difference turns out to be instructive, as it suggests what a Latourian anthropology stands to gain from a neo-Boasian one and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long neglected the future as an object of study, and recent contributions to the topic rarely address it systematically. This essay argues that this is the result of the unfinished project of postcolonial reflexivity about the anthropological subject. Anthropologists are, like most other social scientists, addicted to primitive temporal classifications of modernity and especially its tendency toward epochal thinking. To combat this lack of reflexivity, we need to identify the ideological effect of futuristic thinking and replace it by a more sophisticated plurality of modern futures. An ethnographic and historical focus on the coexistence of open and empty futures and the tendency to devalue the present by not-yet events will result in an anthropology that becomes the more universal as it recognizes the experience of multiple temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts–rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)–and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben's (1998) distinction between bare and qualified life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston (2008) describes as "insurgent" and "differentiated" citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in contexts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty produces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben's emphasis on sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history's effects, and life's possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on research on the relationship between religious and anxiety. Topics discussed include the effect of ritual practice to decrease or increase anxiety, the use of Holi and Navratri rituals for stress reduction, and the importance of ethnographic and quantitative stress data in the study of the correlation of ritual and anxiety.

This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the "humanized" camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neolithization processes in the Levant differed from those in Europe. A major population growth was already occurring in the former at the onset of the Late Glacial Maximum. Population growth was not linear but rather reflected local circumstances, both external and internal. In addition to changing environmental conditions, the social implications of growth in community sizes within specific areas should be taken into account. The solutions and mechanisms that people devised during the transition to agriculture in order to counter the stresses stemming from those developments pertain to the tempo and scope of the changes as well as to endemic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special section we propose an interpretation of the emergence and persistence of wealth inequality in premodern populations along with ethnographic and quantitative evidence exploring this hypothesis. The long-term trajectory of inequality in premodern societies, we suggest, is based on the differing importance of three classes of wealth-material, embodied, and relational-together with differences in the transmission of these types of wealth across generations. Subsequent essays in this forum use data on individual and household wealth from 21 populations to evaluate this and related propositions concerning the interaction of wealth class, transmission rates, production systems (foraging, horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural), and inequality. Here we motivate our interpretation by applying our ideas to the Holocene transition from more egalitarian to more stratified societies, introduce key concepts that are developed in the subsequent essays, and comment on some of the limitations of our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early development of their discipline anthropologists have attempted to develop theoretical models that elucidate the complexities of human "being" through a scientific comparison of differences. In recent decades, however, faced with critiques of the supposed white/male/European standpoint of anthropology and accusations of complicity with Western colonial hegemony, many practitioners have become uncertain about the comparative nature of their discipline, seeking sanctuary in less controversial cultural relativity and a focus on specific ethnographic description. This (partly self-imposed) limitation is based, to some extent, upon two false assumptions: that the theories applied to research on social behaviour can be accurately described as "European" and that it is possible for anthropologists to sustain ethnocentric perspectives while engaging in the process of long-term fieldwork, participant observation, and in-depth analysis. The multicultural nature of scientific development is particularly demonstrable in anthropology, where the methodologies employed in ethnographic research have always entailed a dynamic cross-cultural exchange and synthesis of theories and knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of San rock art have generally assumed the existence of a structurally uniform ‘pan-San’ cognitive system from at least 2,000 years B.P. to the present all over southern Africa. It is suggested here that the assumption of continuities in San religious ideology and ritual practice has resulted in insufficient attention to the possible influence of the ideologies and ritual practices of encapsulating black farming communities on the cosmologies and ritual life of their San neighbours and the expression of this influence in the rock art. In the light of recent studies demonstrating the profound effects of contact on hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and elsewhere, the possible expression of southern Nguni and Sotho religious concepts and ritual practices in the rock art of the south-eastern mountains of southern Africa, as a result of symbiotic interaction between south-eastern San and black farmers, is investigated bere. Some of the implications of such symbiotic interaction for the use of ethnographic analogy to interpret rock art and other iconography, as well as some of the implications for debates surrounding the cultural identity of hunter-gatherers in Africa and elsewhere, are discussed. Investigates the possible expression of southern Nguni and Sotho religious concepts and ritual practices in the rock art of the southeastern mountains of southern Africa. Symbiotic interaction between southeastern San and black farmers; Explanation of the overt content and underlying symbolism of San rock art; Paintings in Melikane and Upper Mangolong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how wetlands have influenced hunter-gatherer communities across the world. The relationship with wetlands goes back to the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods. Information about the adaptations made by hunter-gatherers in a geographic and temporal range on four scales is presented. These adaptions include a short term local focus on ethnographic observations, a short term regional focus on human ecology and land use, a long term local perspective concentrating on the changes in land use pattern over a long time period and a long term regional perspective covering both long term land use patterns and human ecosystem over a large area along with required adaptations.

The article presents the author's views on issues related to the development of contemporary ethnographic texts. It presents an ethnographic approach to represent the discourse between people involved in a ethnographic project. For the development of his ethnographic text, the author appointed a first-draft editor and an editor. Both were not true native to the ethnographic field. The first-draft editor subsequently read the chapters of the author's manuscript. The first-editor's experience in the CBST ethnography resulted in extensive changes to the wording and structure of major parts of the manuscripts. The author had an argument over the visibility of women in the manuscript with his manuscript editor. After making changes suggested by his editor, the author submitted his completed manuscript. The author was praised for his work for its professional contribution. But there was a concern over issues related to lesbians of CBST. The editor was required to raise questions and make suggestions to address the sensitivities of the lesbian congregants.

The article comments on the research paper titled "Too much democracy in all the wrong places: toward a grammar of participation." It states that the author of the paper expressed a skeptical and critical tone presents us with an accurate interpretation of participation as a form of governance, a mechanism of domination, and mentions a study on a rural, depopulated area of Asturias, in northwestern Spain, through an ethnographic approach to the changing governance structures.

The article discusses the contribution of John Knight the recent contribution on hunting pairs has raised important issues and open up a cognitive New Age reverie. It mentions that South Africa eland plays an important role in a theocratic form in contrast to the master of animals. It also notes on the ethnographic work which focuses on traditional community members subscribe to notions.

The article offers the author's insights regarding the ethnographic research related to hunting in south India and subarctic of Canada. The author mentions that several ethnic families are compared in the study including Paliyan, Malapandaram and Chenchu. The author states that hunters used to involve spirits during their hunting activities, according to the general statement of theorists.

The article presents the author's views on the article "Are East African Pastoralists Truly Conservationists?," by Lore M. Ruttan and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, which has been published within the issue. The author thinks that the study has contributed a lot in developing an evolutionary ecological approach in studying pastoralist conservationists. The study analyzes wealth and power differentials identified through an ethnographic observation of Barabaig pastoralism.