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Giving a precise definition of what an institution is raises epistemological dilemmas concerning its supposed universal applicability and the coexistence of different institutional regimes (e.g. state and customary). Scholars who have dabbled with this question often identify rules, behaviours, values, or social roles as the essence of institutions. In fact, these constitutive features do not necessarily occupy a leading position in all societies. In this article, I argue that, among East African pastoral populations such as the Samburu of northern Kenya, institutions of age class systems are the product of the changing identities of the person's maturation process. These institutionalized life cycles regulate the distribution of powers, rights, and duties within the community. Moreover, if institutions can be different 'things', similarly, the objects through which they materialize can vary profoundly from one social system to another. In the case of the Samburu, customary age institutions can be perceived, performed, and manipulated in the form of songs, dances, and ornaments that represent their tangible, aural, visible, and actionable substance. Just as age manifests itself through the body, institutions founded on age take shape through sonic and kinetic bodily expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From an early age, children become attuned to processes of social power in their environment. Findings from cognitive sciences suggest that the ability to discern hierarchical relationships, as well as coercive and non‐coercive processes that give rise to them, rests on evolved cognitive capacities. Yet reasoning about social relations is always already a cultural process. Anthropological theory routinely deploys terms such as 'power' and 'hierarchy' to analyse diverse features of social organization, but little is known about the culturally grounded psychological processes that give rise to hierarchies at the interpersonal level. A comparison of children in London and Nanjing brings together ethnographic and experimental approaches to cut across the cognitive, social, and cultural dimensions of child development, and reveals how central moral frameworks mediating hierarchy and conflict – respect in London and yielding in Nanjing – lead to particular expectations about the behaviour of high‐status individuals. This article highlights the benefits of mixed methodology in providing insights into how children develop psychologically and culturally rooted understandings of social status and provides directions for anthropology to contribute to the multidisciplinary study of the social cognition of human hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Islamic Counselling training model discussed in this article first emerged in 1990s multicultural Britain within the newly expanding field of cross‐cultural counselling and psychotherapy. It is informed by classical Sufi notions of the self, the development of an Islamic psychology, and decolonial scholarship. Based on ethnographic research on the current training in Islamic Counselling, this article explores the ways in which this model trains students to engage with relational differences through non‐secular notions of reality, the self, and its relation to multiple others. Differences are made sense of through notions of 'worldview' and 'journey' that go beyond categories of culture, religion, and race, and while these differences are similarly 'acknowledged', there is also the possibility of surpassing them through an experiential process of 'witnessing'. Islamic Counselling's therapeutic goal, therefore, is not the forging of a pious self, but transcendence: the establishing of a deeply felt understanding of Oneness or Truth. Through this process, Islamic Counselling holds difference and connection in view simultaneously, while challenging a relativist notion of cultural difference inherent in ethno‐psychiatry and cross‐cultural counselling. It offers a radically new mode of relating with differences within and beyond the counselling setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is generally associated with the creation of something new and with economic growth, and is often understood in relation to modernity and its prime social site, 'the city'. Accordingly, the coupling of innovation and rural areas may seem incongruent. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israel's high‐tech scene, we analyse innovation centres located primarily in kibbutzim in the northern and southern regions of the country. This allows us to juxtapose the ultra‐modernist and individualist ethos of the creative actor against a more communal understanding of social life. In these sites, we observe not just the imitation of 'urban' innovation, but also the strong influence of the community and the contribution of local knowledge in the design of technologically innovative products and services. Examining what is taking place outside urban centres thus enables a more complete and nuanced understanding of the interplay between innovation and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores hospitality as a key rhetorical framework for refugee management in Turkey by focusing on how host‐guest relations are mobilized to represent, interpret, and problematize the current state of affairs regarding Syrian refugees, as well as to formulate policies. It analyses the transformation of hospitality rhetoric, the notion of 'compulsory guesthood', and the most recent social cohesion initiatives. I argue that host‐guest metaphors are used to assert power and leverage both domestically and internationally by exerting sovereign control over a post‐imperial nation‐space, performing neo‐imperial guardianship over the downtrodden, and claiming an ethno‐religious, civilizational morality that exceeds the legalistic logic of human rights and entitlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, radical nationalist and quasi‐fascist movements defining themselves in opposition to the Russian government dominated the country's paramilitary scene. This trend was almost completely reversed in the 2010s, with the relative decline of grassroots Slavic ethno‐nationalism and the emergence of a statist military‐patriotic culture centred on 'traditional values' and Orthodox faith. Drawing on field research with members of a Moscow‐based military‐patriotic club, this article shows how Orthodoxy emerged as an attractive ideological framework to give meaning to individual and communal practices of moral and physical self‐cultivation among patriotically oriented young middle‐class men. I argue that rather than a process of militarization of a religious public, the establishment of the Orthodox military‐patriotic milieu in the late 2000s is better understood as the Orthodoxization of the Russian paramilitary sphere, driven by young militaristically minded men's search for a sense of purpose and belonging. This post‐Soviet Orthodox paramilitary scene that combines militant masculinities with promotion of law abidance and civic values effectively works to curtail more extreme forms of ethno‐nationalism and thus invites us to rethink conventional wisdom on the relationship between religion, militarism, and violent radicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary sharing economy comprises a variety of technology‐mediated user‐to‐user transactions and reveals both the extremes of the late‐capitalist regime of accumulation and possible paths to supersede it. To critically explore the idea of the sharing economy, this article examines how it has been mobilized by a non‐profit startup in neoliberalized South Korea. Open Closet cheaply rents donated suits to precarious job‐seekers for interviews, while requesting that donors and renters write each other letters with their 'suit stories'. The article tracks how sharing at Open Closet is realized via circulations of suits, letters, and 'warm hearts', and how its meanings and obligations are interpreted via the historical relations of mutual responsibility within local collectivities of belonging. The article thus illuminates new imaginaries for livelihoods, subjecthoods, and solidarities that emerge when the contemporary sharing economy ambiguates capitalist and non‐capitalist relations, becoming a site for experimentation with affectivity and mutuality among strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an ethnographically embedded analysis of a UK‐based Jewish‐Muslim inter‐community network to contribute to anthropological research into the ethical efforts that groups seen as polarized invest in negotiating boundaries of difference. The article makes two sets of arguments. First, it suggests that sometimes such groups have to negotiate not one but several 'borders across difference' and follow diverse ethical routes to navigate them depending upon how they conceptualize these borders. Second, it shows that in negotiating different sets of boundaries, network members often use techniques that at first glance appear to be artificial or even superficial in that they build on formal rules and/or contain no promise of achieving a consensus on issues important for the participants. However, I argue that these seemingly superficial efforts could still be seen as ethical endeavours underpinned by a strong commitment to inter‐group solidarity and that they could be best understood as what Ruth Sheldon has described in her recent intervention in the ethics of Jewish ethnography as the movement between surface and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The face of the government is the interface through which citizens come into contact with and perceive the government via representation and face‐to‐face encounters. This article focuses on Colombian government officials in charge of delivering 'peace pedagogy' to explain to society the peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas, before and after a polarizing referendum which narrowly rejected the 2016 peace agreement that sought to end fifty years of war. It builds on their idiom of 'giving face' (dar la cara), denoting the work of representing the government to society in face‐to‐face encounters and assuming responsibility as the government, and explores its resonance with academic and popular discourses about the state having many 'faces'. It brings this idiom, and theories of the face, into the anthropology of the state, calling for the study of governments as discrete entities within states, and examining the way that a government's overarching character or 'face' is interactively co‐produced in the public gaze through embodied acts of representation by officials with their audiences, and intertwined with people's macro‐political opinions. It offers a framework for analysing government‐society relations, giving insight into how all governments 'face' society, and highlights presence and responsibility as key dimensions of this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practising Orthodox Christians in central Serbia live their liturgical lives within the idiom of Serbian peoplehood. This article probes the 'people' (narod) – perceived locally as an historically and geographically rooted ethno‐moral collectivity – as a core concept of belonging which is key for understanding post‐Yugoslav Orthodox life. The 'people' functions as a this‐worldly collective identity within which my interlocutors situate themselves as Orthodox persons, and through which they approach the Divine. Threats to Serb identity serve to foreground peoplehood as the supposedly prime site for Orthodox flourishing. Moving beyond state‐oriented analyses of 'religious nationalism', the article demonstrates not how 'nationalism' can be understood through 'religion', but how, to use Orthodox Serbs' own terminology, faith can be understood through the prism of peoplehood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bureaucracy and audit are an increasingly pervasive fact of scientific and academic life. In this article, I examine this bureaucracy through the perspectives of non‐faculty staff at a Chinese research institute: the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF). I build upon the lament of a staff member called Tao that inflexible bureaucracy is the consequence of civil servants' determination to evade vulnerability. Bringing Tao and her colleagues' analyses into conversation with the anthropology of gift exchange, I show how a literature that has long informed anthropological analyses of informal bureaucratic back doors provides an equally rich set of resources for understanding bureaucracy's formal, document‐mediated front door. Most especially, I draw upon the anthropology of gifts to illuminate the anxieties and vulnerabilities that shape and are shaped by bureaucratic practice. This approach can help us to understand Chinese bureaucracy in an era of increasing wariness towards informal social connections (guanxi). It can also help us to explore what might be at stake for the non‐faculty colleagues who – despite their indispensable roles – we seldom consider in conversations about academic audit cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the latent potential in the anthropological concept of survival, especially through Tylor's usage of the term. Once a core concept of anthropological theory in the late nineteenth century, the idea was critiqued and abandoned in the wake of the structural and functional anthropology of the early twentieth century. However, the concept implies many different things, and in clearing away some of the more problematic meanings, this article focuses on the core of the idea: namely the persistence of the past in the present. The intention is to examine the concept in terms of what it tells us about the relation between the past and the present and, by implication, the historical process itself. By drawing on the distinctions between survival and related terms of relics, persistent practices, and revivals, this article suggests a reappraisal of the concept and its relevance to contemporary anthropology and archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the collection activities of Paul Dyck (1917–2016), a collector of Native North American Plains objects. Paul Dyck's extensive archive is employed to explore networks of collectors and their practices, spanning the entirety of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving ethnographic material conducted with private collectors and heirs alongside Dyck's correspondence, Dyck's activities are situated within the history of anthropological thought, a discourse on the nature of settler colonial practices of collection, and U.S. settler identity formation. The article draws on these insights to introduce settler materiality, a new theoretical term and definition with relevance for anthropologists, Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars, historians, and settlercolonial theorists interested in the way material culture functions in settler colonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the constitutive role of blame in kinship as a practice in a low‐income neighbourhood in India's capital city, Delhi. Using ethnographic data, I show how women with serious or chronic illness express blame towards kin for their failures in critical moments: for not providing care during illness, not fulfilling kinship obligations, and even for causing or exacerbating illness. As relationships rupture to reveal the underlying precariousness of kinship, women use blaming statements, accusations, and critique to leverage toeholds of power and take matters into their hands against their families' wishes. Yet even as women forge a degree of agency through blaming practices, I show that these practices can lead, paradoxically, to the repair and reconstitution of kinship. This article builds upon existing scholarship that addresses both the failure of kinship as a system of mutual support and the work of kinship repair in similar marginal contexts in north India characterized by neglect, which render women vulnerable to negative effects. My focus on blaming acts offers a new angle on this intimate terrain, illustrating how women enact the social practice of blame to reshape the dynamics and terms of kinship relations, rather than reconciling themselves to kinship failings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab – emerging out of a self‐described 'poverty of mobility' – demonstrate the utility of a more expansive conceptualization of ritual in anthropology. Instead of taking ritual for a scripturally canonized 'manual for' pious self‐cultivation, here I approach ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This approach produces a dynamic and spatial conception of ziyarat as a ritual of mobility. Ethnographic attention to these pilgrims' politically conditioned and regionally networked spatial practices reveals that their movements are irreducible to ethical projects of cultivating piety alone. What is at stake in Iranian pilgrims' movements is nothing short of the extra‐religious conditions of religion – those of the economy and the polity. These stakes illuminate how religious practices interarticulate with political and social institutions – including bazaars, borders, and shrines – that remain understudied in recent anthropological scholarship on Islamic piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the life stories of Indonesian Muslims who struggle with same‐sex attraction (henceforth SSA) and believe that their SSA is divinely foreordained as a test from Allah. I draw on seventeen months of ethnographic research in an online community called Yayasan Peduli Sahabat (henceforth YPS) which prescribes ways to live heterosexually to its members and clients with SSA. In this article, I argue that the members of YPS are exercising their agency when they try to discipline their sexuality and live as heterosexuals. In this way, this study contributes to the existing literature on the agency of illiberal religious subjects by discussing the extent to which agency is practised in the face of one's relations with the divine and human‐mediated religious authority. Drawing on these interrelated themes, this article conjoins anthropological scholarship on self‐cultivation, divine intervention, and religious authority. Instead of understanding Muslims' lives through the shift from a self‐cultivation paradigm to the paradigm of divine intervention, I suggest that both paradigms are instructive and attending to them could elucidate how Muslims with SSA exercise their agency while continuing to be affected by the divine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the styles of enquiry involved in Lowland South American Amerindian shamanic and narrative discourse genres. The article argues in favour of the existence of an Amazonian mode of thinking strictly related to formulaic composition, commonly found in different verbal poetic genres and its contemporary transformations into written texts published as books by Amerindian researchers and narrators. Taking into account philosophical and anthropological discussions about speculative thinking, this study aims to revise the role of narrative verbal genres in Amerindian ethnology and its ontological backgrounds, as well as offering an alternative perspective on the contrast between writing and oral traditions. The article is based on translations of songs and testimonies collected among the Marubo of Western Amazonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an ethnographic account of understandings of 'ethnic' difference in Khovd province, Mongolia. It attempts to use said material to challenge the terms of debate within the current concern with 'essentialism' in social theory. It is in agreement with constructivist‐inspired observations by anthropologists that so‐called ethnic groups in Mongolia exist partly as ideological ascriptions arising from historical and contemporary political interests. Yet there is an intellectual tension, which sees the anthropologist engaged in the politically important task of the de‐essentialization of identities, on behalf of people who claim said identities as their essence. This article neither accepts ethnic groups as somehow unproblematically real, nor positions such ideas purely as a target for deconstruction. Rather, it provides an account of times when moralized understandings of ethnic difference in the medium of mythic‐historical exemplars are mobilized and examines their impact on social life. It shows that certain forms of essentialism may contain affordances that amplify social and political possibilities, rather than violently close them down. The final provocation is that anthropologists and social theorists would do better to examine the precise nature and effects of particular instances of essentialism rather than instinctively demolish them in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article uncovers a forgotten chapter in the history of anthropology by revealing the experiences of American ethnographers in Turkey between 1967 and 1969. Using original archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on the trials of Professor Lloyd A. Fallers as well as doctoral students Michael Meeker, Peter Benedict, and June Starr in navigating Turkish bureaucracy and global politics. Conceptually, the article evaluates the case of anthropologists in Cold War Turkey from the perspective of hospitality studies with a particular focus on guest‐to‐guest relationships. Adopting the guests' points of view shows us that hospitality assemblages are forged by other‐oriented thinking and behaviour, which involves misunderstandings, empathy, and projection. The article conceives the hospitality relationship as an encounter among perceptions of hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic, structural, and enacted violence. Today, continued inequality at local and global levels is deeply complicated by corporate globalization and climate change. Ethnographic research and anthropological engagement is urgent and critical, requiring our persistence to redress social wrongs through supportive, generous partnerships, as advocates and as outspoken witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts are in turn produced by political economies of development expertise and academic knowledge production. Indeed, social anthropology's core research practices were shaped by its configuration within political economies of colonial governance, and they were perpetuated through the expansion of university systems. We should, then, stop sustaining the fictions that our work is situated outside political economies of interest or that we write purely in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, we need to be more transparent about the economies that determine the kinds of knowledge we produce and the political implications of what we authorize as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"What good is anthropology?" Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi‐Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such as the first generation of postcolonial anthropologists in India, as they confronted the question whether India may be seen as a settler colony. How was such a spirit born? As one possible beginning, I offer a creation myth for the birth of anthropological sensibility, located in a key moment of the Ramayana, when its tribal/lower‐caste poet‐author, Valmiki, begins to enunciate differently, after witnessing an act of human, settler violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex‐soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to avoid portraying their unlikable traits, internal contradictions, or troubling actions that do not advance our arguments. Ethnography often reveals florid complexity in structures or systems, but it creates simpler depictions of the people who inhabit these forms. Yet, since anthropology has long aimed to holistically capture the truth of social life, it should allow more space in ethnographic narrative for complicated protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do passion and poetry play in our research‐based quest to promote social justice? In this piece—a manifesto of sorts—I make a case for prioritizing both passion and poetry in our ethnographic writing. Such a commitment will allow our insights to be learned, our interlocutors' and our own voices to be heard, and our policy recommendations to be heeded. But writing poetically from a place of passion is just the first step. User‐friendly, public writing deserves a sociologically friendly platform. Hence, in the second part of this manifesto, I outline a series of steps that I recommend our discipline take in order to radically scale up our commitment to practice an engaged anthropology. Such tactics will allow us to more realistically promote our knowledge as we advocate for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development—from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society—the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging not just the finished product, when critique is so easily possible, but the process of development, as the work is yet underway. Such engagement is enabled by how people leverage their commitments, stances, and manner of being there along the way and over time. To better enable the impact of anthropology in this work, anthropologists would be well served by engaging more with these kinds of applied questions as a part of their training and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anthropology reaches maturity, its contributions are likely to grow. This is because the discipline's practitioners, in writing parochial ethnography, can link a respect for individual difference to our understanding of global humanity. Such a practice aligns with the growing political struggle to retain meaning in an expanding world. Moreover, anthropology's commitment to life as lived research, including private domains and engagement with digital worlds, will also become more significant, while anthropology's ethos of empathy will expand beyond the human. Reaching maturity will require a further repudiation of inequality and colonialism, developing a different relationship to theory, philosophy, and engaged anthropology, as well as fostering a much wider commitment to global education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's "meta," or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2011, public scandals and high‐visibility critiques of research methods in psychology fed a broader "replication crisis": foundational experiments could not be replicated, and statistical methods in social psychology demonstrated vulnerability to fraud and manipulation. Even well‐intended researchers following accepted psychological protocols—zombie methodologies—could unintentionally produce false positives. In response, social psychologists have called for greater sensitivity to cultural diversity, a deeper consideration of social context, and more methodological reflection. The contrast with anthropology is dramatic, highlighting some of the strengths of our field: methodological versatility, appreciation of human variability, theoretical creativity, and a solid foundation for synthetic, interdisciplinary collaboration grounded in our tradition of holism. The human sciences are an important audience for anthropologists, as the example of cognitive science shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as "ugly," is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological project and a representational practice. Like Arbus's photographs, anthropology is good for subverting the privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who are prepared to contemplate "ugly" people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic anthropology is a paradoxical realm. On the one hand, opportunities for creatively exploring the human condition are hemmed in by administrators and bureaucracy. On the other hand, scholars in the academy have the space to call for justice—in Palestine and elsewhere, as they did in 2023, when the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution to boycott Israeli institutions. This paradoxical quality suggests some parallels between anthropology and the human rights system, especially in their logics and activities. Drawing from my experiences as I step off the professional academic ladder, I reflect on how this complex academic environment can lead to cynicism and resentment, yet also produce launching pads to collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological accounts of sexual and gendered difference often serve the role of footnotes that buttress and even expand the reach of Euro‐American concepts. In contrast to this contained role for anthropology, queer footnotes can push the discipline toward more capacious and experimental engagements with powerful knowledge. In 2020, governments around the world introduced lockdowns and border‐control measures in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This was the case in Australia, where I undertook fieldwork with trans‐ and queer Indonesians living in Melbourne. In Australia, COVID‐19 public health measures paralleled and exacerbated migration restrictions on people living with HIV and the criminalization of sex work. Asian, queer, trans‐, and sex worker bodies were addressed as a moral and physiological contagion. Queer anthropology is good for maintaining a critical ethnographic focus on how the state governs through a racial biopolitics of containment, and generates concepts for public health that shift the focus from security to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Sciences have been interested in biographical studies since the 1920s. However, this way of observing and analyzing social phenomena was displaced, between the World War II and the 1980s, from the methodological scene. According to Daniel Bertaux, the oblivion in which the biographical method fell in that period is attributable to a double imperialism: the one of the structural-functionalism and the one of survey research. During the 1980s there was a new appearance of the biographical method within the social sciences that progressively derived in the consolidation of an academic field in which take part multiple disciplines (history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, among others). The biographical studies field is characterized for the existence and, in the last years, proliferation of empirical research that relate theoretical elements that belong to different fields of knowledge. In this article, I present some reflections on the use of the biographical method within the social sciences. First of all, I make a brief historical review of the method origins, its disappearance from the methodological scene, its resurgence and, finally, its actual relevance. Then, I mention the main biographical research styles, according to the typology made by Ernesto Meccia (2019a). In third place, I highlight the differences between two terms that, within the biographical method field, are used frequently as synonyms: life history and life story. After that, I reflect on the truth status of the testimonies. In general terms, I conceive testimonies as tools for identity (re) construction and not only as factual accounts limited to an informative function. Then, I specify the way in which life stories assume a certain plot, an arrangement that is given by the biographical events or turning points. Finally, I show how life stories can express different social issues and problems that go beyond the biography itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationally redeeming fieldwork institute. This article parses how some modernist anthropologists distanced themselves from Blom's imperial legacy, while others pressed his ideas of cultural continuity into implicit, controversial claims for their centrality to ancient and modern Maya studies writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching and learning patient advocacy in academic health centers requires critical engagement with social, political, and cultural conceptions of racial difference. This article considers understandings of race and racism typically drawn upon in health care and suggests which historical and social science-based approaches should be used in health professions teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2023, the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) members voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions until they end their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The AAA's adoption of this resolution shows the potential good of anthropology, both within and beyond the academy. Anthropology's disciplinary scholarly processes, methods, and theoretical frameworks paved the way for this resolution, providing one answer to the question, What good is anthropology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology and its marquee method, ethnography, have recently been promoted as an analytical key for unlocking problems faced in other domains. This review addresses two books that argue for the value of this anthropological lens: Anthro‐Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, by Gillian Tett, and How to Think like an Anthropologist, by Matthew Engelke. The differences between these works highlight the risk of deploying anthropology as a means to other ends, without subjecting those ends to the same theorization and scrutiny as one's topic or methods. While these authors demonstrate that there is significant value that the anthropological toolkit can provide, both in life and in business, there remains a fine line to be drawn between the instrumentalization of the discipline and the broader pursuit for knowledge and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Social sciences research in leishmaniases and Chagas disease (CD) increased over time. • Major themes found: Sociocultural, socioeconomic & historical dimensions of the diseases. • Understanding social institutions' impacts on NTD's burden is key to public health. • Future research can mitigate and undo the ways structural biases have infiltrated biomedicine. Scholars have called for increased attention to sociocultural, economic, historical, and political processes shaping Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) ecology. We conducted a scoping review to identify major research themes and the knowledge gaps in social science literature in leishmaniases or Chagas disease (CD). Following the scoping review protocol, we first determined the focus of the review to be centered on identifying research that approaches leishmaniases and CD from social science perspective and was indexed by large, biomedically focused databases. We then searched PubMed and Web of Science using "Leishmaniasis" and "Chagas disease" with "social science" or "anthropology" as search terms. We analyzed 199 articles (123 on leishmaniases and 76 on CD), categorizing them into three main research themes. Sociocultural dimensions of the diseases (leishmaniases=60.2 %; CD=68.4 %) primarily focused on individuals' knowledge, practices, and behaviors, barriers to accessing healthcare (especially in endemic regions), psychosocial effects, stigma, and traditional treatments. Research focused on socioeconomic dimensions of the diseases (leishmaniases=29.3 %; CD=19.7 %) included topics like household characteristics, social capital, and infrastructure access. A final theme, the historical and political contexts of the diseases (Leishmaniases=10.5 %; CD=11.9 %) was less common than other themes. Here, studies consider civil war and the (re)emergence of leishmaniasis, as well as the significance of CD discovery for scientific and public health in Brazil, which is the most common country for research on both leishmaniases and CD that draws on social science approaches. Future directions for research include focusing on how social institutions and economic factors shape diseases education, control measures, healthcare access, and quality of life of people affected by NTDs. Greater attention to social sciences can help mitigate and undo the ways that structural biases have infiltrated biomedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]