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How people speak of hunger extends beyond statements about food adequacy; people's remarks may reflect experiences of poverty and feelings of vulnerability, and may be used to request help. In this article, we build on the idea of idioms of distress to conceptualize hunger talk as expressing more than an empty belly. We draw on ethnographic data gathered in two settings in South Africa: one a peri-urban area under traditional jurisdiction in the Eastern Cape Province; the other an inner-city suburb of the largest city, Johannesburg, in Gauteng. Hunger-related idioms of distress help illustrate the complex interplay of social, economic, and cultural factors, and allow people to speak of various affective and material aspects of their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A formal Gender Dysphoria classification— as outlined in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders— is a prerequisite for the reimbursement of both gender‐affirming medical care and transgender mental health care in the Netherlands. Gender Dysphoria and its conceptual precursors have always been moving targets: moving due to research, policy, care practices and activism both within and outside of medicine. This raises the question of what Gender Dysphoria is exactly. To elucidate this question, we turn to the people who use the concept in clinical practice to come to a diagnosis and treatment indication: mental health professionals working in gender‐affirming medical care and transgender mental health care. Using a material semiotics approach, we reflect upon how Gender Dysphoria is done in clinical practice. Based on an analysis of seventeen practice‐based interviews with clinicians as well as an examination of clinical guidelines and texts, we describe four modes in which Gender Dysphoria is ordered. These modes of ordering illustrate that Gender Dysphoria is not one, but multiple. We illustrate how in the mode of isolating, Gender Dysphoria is something which is carefully isolated from mental disorders, while in the modes doing the future and narrating, Gender Dysphoria is done as a continuous and predictable object of care. Such orderings of Gender Dysphoria potentially conflict with a fourth mode of ordering: the doing of diversity in transgender health care. The study's findings provide empirical insights into how transgender health care is currently done in The Netherlands and provide a foundation on which ethical debates on what good transgender health care should entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experiences and motivations of young volunteers engaged in the development domain of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Uganda. While promoting various family-planning projects, volunteers deftly navigated human-rights discourses of international donors, norms of religious leaders, and development narratives of national policymakers as they attempted to advance their own life projects. Through the creation of new narratives and their agency, the volunteers translated, reformed, and re-presented Global North development discourse as part of a situated theorization on development problems. Simultaneously these educated, middle-class youth embraced the discursively vague field of family planning as the likeliest avenue for social mobility by becoming "big" within national and local patrimonial and patriarchal systems. Although such family-planning programs do seem to allow some volunteers to achieve their goals, they paradoxically reproduce the patriarchal systems that gender-equality NGOs aim to dismantle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gisli Palsson, Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 234 pp. What do Manhattan spit parties, Innuit genomics, Nim Chimpsky, and Icelandic fishing have [...]

In the early 2000s, massive economic and technical resources accompanied the framing of HIV as a humanitarian and global health crisis in much of the Global South. These resources and framing combined to produce and enhance a wide range of HIV-related structures, skills, and knowledge with afterlives that have exceeded the crisis period in Kenya and elsewhere. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among HIV support groups in Nairobi, Kenya, conducted in the decade that followed the declared crisis period, we examine how local providers of HIV care and services understood the crisis and crisis narratives and practices. We highlight the consequences of after-crisis financial cutbacks, including anxiety, redundancy, financial hardship, and the devaluation and underutilization of expertise and care infrastructures. We argue that the structures, knowledge, and skills developed through engagements with international aid have complex afterlives, often concealed for lack of funding and forced dormancy. Our research examines strategies deployed by actors on the ground to continue offering services and support in the wake of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musulmanes, Musulmans au Caire, a Teheran, Istanbul, Paris, Dakar Parc de la Villette Pavillon Paul Delouvrier Paris, France May 19-November 14, 2004 Urban Islam Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) [...]

Facing an ever-changing political-economic landscape marked by inequality, joblessness, and xenophobia, migrants in inner city Johannesburg are pushed towards the economic margins, or the 'corner' of life. In this precarious place, structural and everyday violence shape the daily lives and practices of men from various parts of Africa. This article examines how such men work to live up to self and societal expectations of masculinities while attempting to adjust to the socio-economic realities they face. Departing from the crisis in masculinity narrative, we highlight the multiple, creative ways that men navigate precarity. Our arguments are based on an ethnographic study of masculinities and violence, conducted from June 2017 to February 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Drawing on the stories of two migrant men and more broadly from observations undertaken at Uncle Kofi's Corner, a street corner hangout and our main ethnographic site, we show how participants mapped urban space to produce enclaved masculinities. In these enclaves, specific scripts on how to be a man were (re)constructed resulting in multiple and unstable masculinities in a perpetual state of becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, heteronormative presumptions relating to masculinity dictate that men should be engaged in or actively pursuing heterosexual relationships. For many gay men, fears of social rejection, stigma, and legal repercussion combine to prevent them from being open about their sexuality. This article examines social and legal pressures experienced by gay men in Dar es Salaam and the ways they navigate their daily lives to avoid detection and act in instances where they fail to adhere to ascribed norms of masculinity. Our arguments draw on one year of ethnographic research among gay men aged 18 years and above in Dar es Salaam in 2017. Our findings show that gay men are under constant pressure to meet expectations such as having female sexual partners, getting married, and having children, as well as to conform with masculine body styling norms. In trying to navigate between masculine expectations of society and the desire to live freely as men who desire other men, they resort to a range of temporal, spatial and bodily tactics to conceal homosexual practices and identities from family and neighbors. These techniques include socializing, dating, and sometimes marrying women in response to family and societal pressure. They also dress in prescribed ways to conform to heteronormative standards, carefully attending to space and time to identify safe places for being gay, and utilizing mobile phones and social media to build communities of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]