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Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover (LULC) and their drivers is instrumental in synthesizing knowledge for informed natural resource management, planning, and associated decisions. The objective of this study was to analyze LULC dynamics and their drivers in the Nyangatom district of southwest Ethiopia. This study adopted a mixed-method approach, comprising remote sensing and geographic information system-based analysis, focus-group discussions, key informant interviews, and structured interviews covering 384 agro-pastoral households. Land use and land cover maps were compiled with Landsat image data from 1992, 1999, 2010, and 2020 using supervised pixel-based classification with a maximum likelihood algorithm. The study revealed that grassland (33%) and shrub land (27%) are the dominant LULC classes in the study periods. The results show a significant increase in settlement, cropland, and bare land, between 1992 and 2020 following demand for fertile lands, overgrazing, and climate changes. Reductions in the water body, open woodland, riverine forest, and dense woodland of − 23%, − 18%, − 18%, and − 7%, respectively, were observed for the same period with an overall accuracy of 80%. Agro-pastoralists identified agricultural expansion, overgrazing, and drought as the main drivers of LULC changes, followed by conflicts, invasion of alien plant species, and change in policy institutions. The impacts of unplanned LULC change can be reduced through appropriate land-use planning with genuine stakeholder engagement. Updated information on present and future LULC dynamics can support these social dynamics and align a shared understanding among stakeholders that replaces polarization and erosion of mutual trust.

Section: Forum Non

Studying atrocities poses many challenges for ethnographers, not least of which is how to represent violent experiences, which often exceed articulation. The atrocities perpetrated during the military dictatorship in Argentina are no exception. Yet, during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires, I found that the violence forcefully surfaced in many ethnographic encounters, as a result of my having accidentally absorbed my interlocutors’ psychoanalytic reasoning into my ethnographic praxis. Everyday psychoanalytic practices used among survivors and the relatives of the disappeared, such as catharsis and working through guilt, filtered through ongoing self-reflections and served a crucial role in my emerging understanding of an Argentine “ethics of feelings.” I couple this shared psychoanalytic praxis with creative prose as one integral way of practicing an ethnography of violence. Communicating through words that instill rather than explain the vexed feelings engages readers with the indeterminateness of violence and psychic “depths” in Argentina. This way of doing anthropology is what I call deep ethnography—an emergent form of sensing, talking, thinking, and writing about feelings.

A growing body of scholarly work addresses the involvement, in migration governance, of civil society actors. Much of this literature highlights–within the bottom-up initiatives of NGOs, charities, volunteers and activists–the central role of hospitality and solidarity. Civil society initiatives are often contrasted to restrictive state policies and assumed to favour democratic integration. In this article, I question this interpretation in favour of a more complex, messier account of reality. In civil society initiatives, bordering is as much the doing of institutions as it is of citizens who, through borderwork, construct and contest borders. Through an analysis of everyday practices of migrant support in Milan, Italy, I bring this messiness to the fore. I rely on ethnographic insight to highlight contradictions embedded in borderwork, in which seemingly opposed forces are present. I show that the space between such opposites is a space in which the meaning of borders is constantly negotiated. My data adds complexity to interpretations of civil-society initiatives, suggesting that, when ordinary citizens engaging in them enable mobility for some and hinder it for others, this is the very essence of borderwork.

One of the most visible and enduring vestiges of colonialism is its buildings. In this article I address the question of how current approving references to the colonial buildings in Indonesia should be explained, looking at one particular city, Surabaya. The cheerful, innovative adoption of colonial themes defies an analysis in terms of ‘imperial debris’. I propose to borrow the term ‘bricolage’ from Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe this process in which people make new associations between selected colonial buildings and their own present lives. Bricolage is the selective conceptual appropriation of the colonial buildings for whatever objective the user finds convenient: objects to boost city marketing, a company advertisement, stops on a heritage tour, amusing backdrops for pictures and selfies, a counterpoint to a consumerist lifestyle in shopping malls. For colonial building enthusiasts, the love of colonial design and old urban quarters is more than a matter of the aesthetics of urban spaces, but also, indirectly, a critique of the transformation of modern cities by short-sighted real-estate developers and city administrators, who demolish irreplaceable buildings in acts of ‘architectural suicide’.

When the West African nation of Ghana attained its independence from colonial rule in 1957, its traditional culture was to be promoted in all sectors of public life. Similarly, what was construed as Ghanaian traditional religion was to be treated equally with Christianity and Islam. The ritual offering of libations to ancestral spirits and deities was considered the Ghanaian equivalent to Christian and Muslim prayers, and it has been performed side by side with them in all sorts of national events. Later on, the libation ritual became a symbol of both Ghana’s religious diversity and its national culture, transcending religious divisions. Many Christian groups, especially from the Pentecostal-charismatic movement, have refused to accept the public status of the libation ritual in view of its alleged immoral ‘pagan’ associations. When the pouring of libations was removed from the Independence Day ceremonies held at the state capital in 2011, the public debate soon turned to the relationship between the government and Pentecostal churches, and accusations of religious intolerance were levelled. This article discusses how the arguments about the status of the ritual boil down to differences in semiotic ideology and notions about proper agency – namely, how forms of agency pertaining to words, objects, persons and spiritual beings involved in the ritual are understood differently by the disputants.

Serious human rights violations, particularly against ethnic minorities, have been a stark reality in Myanmar for many decades. The Rohingya crisis that deteriorated in 2017 and the ongoing abuses in areas of armed conflict such as Kachin, Rakhine, and Shan States, and more recently in response to anti-coup protests, demonstrate the recurrence of violence and trauma. During these decades of violence and ongoing violations, civil society initiatives inside and outside the country have attempted to monitor and document human rights abuses in order to contribute towards accountability and truth-telling. Despite the vast array of civil society documentation efforts, this work has sparked limited scholarly debate, especially concerning the complexities of existing multi-layered systems of documentation. This article analyses the current scope of documentation work related to serious human rights violations in Myanmar and the methods, standards, and audiences of various initiatives. We distinguish three layers of civil society documentation: (i) initiatives carried out on the local level in Myanmar and the various border areas; (ii) initiatives carried out by the refugee and diaspora communities; and (iii) third-party initiatives. We then analyse two elements that complicate documentation efforts, namely the risk of ‘over-documentation’, and issues of hierarchy and contestation. These challenges make clear the value of strengthening partnerships and cooperation for all groups involved in documentation work that aims to promote and protect human rights. We end by cautiously considering the potential impact, value, and limitations of Myanmar’s multi-layered documentation efforts for accountability and truth-telling in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup.

Women play an important role in food value chain development, but their labor is often invisible in related policies. Female injera bakers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, have suffered a similar fate: their labor has been neglected in policies on improving the teff value chain. Teff is a cereal grown in Ethiopia which is used to make the countries' biggest food staple: injera. In this article we describe and analyze the labor of female injera bakers in Addis Ababa in the teff value chain, and the differences in their visibility along the lines of various identity markers. Based on mixed method research, we found that the effect of the changes in the teff value chain on female injera bakers' labor (in)visibility were most negative where certain identity markers intersect. The negative effects run along the lines of the formality of the labor, gender, class, age and health. We conclude that the Ethiopian government's neglect of female stakeholders in the teff value chain has led to the increase of existing inequalities and further marginalization of the most vulnerable women.

In 2019, Bolivia suffered one of the worst forest fires in its history. The rapid advance of the flames provoked reactions in defence of the environment hitherto unknown in Bolivian society. Encouraged by a peaceful march of lowland indigenous communities, a broad spectrum of social actors expressed their indignation at the destruction of the forests and demanded more governmental action. The spontaneous emergence of ecological awareness during the fire crisis allows reflection on the progress in constructing the symbolic state, a state in the “heads” and imaginaries of citizens (Bourdieu, 2014). Social demands during the crisis reflect new expectations placed on a plurinational state respectful of the rights of nature. By ignoring the ongoing ecological catastrophe, the government placed itself at the margin of an emerging symbolic order to which it had previously contributed and of which it is a product.

Responses to the trauma of rape vary. People find different responses helpful and a multiplicity of trauma theories should be considered. Through an autoethnography and critical phenomenology of myself and my collaborators in Sierra Leone after I was raped there, I analyze how subjective and cultural frames for managing rape impact an individual's processing of the experience; how they shape ideas of self, community, and world; and how they frame their unraveling and remaking. While I retreated, internalized, and individualized my rape, my collaborators wanted me to externalize it, let the community help, and undergo a ritual to disconnect me from my rapist. Cross-cultural exchange can enhance understandings of responses to trauma and approaches to healing. This is done not to cement cultural frames, to localize or to particularize trauma, nor to overgeneralize but to consider interlocking factors, fill in politically created gaps in focus and memory, and consider multiplicity as enriching on a level playing field. This may help decenter Euro-American notions of trauma and foster an ethics of care.

Studies showed that Brazilian Amazon indigenous territories (ITs) are efficient models for preserving forests by reducing deforestation, fires, and related carbon emissions. Considering the importance of ITs for conserving socio-environmental and cultural diversity and the recent climb in the Brazilian Amazon deforestation, we used official remote sensing datasets to analyze deforestation inside and outside indigenous territories within Brazil's Amazon biome during the 2013–2021 period. Deforestation has increased by 129% inside ITs since 2013, followed by an increase in illegal mining areas. In 2019–2021, deforestation was 195% higher and 30% farther from the borders towards the interior of indigenous territories than in previous years (2013–2018). Furthermore, about 59% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions within ITs in 2013–2021 (96 million tons) occurred in the last three years of analyzed years, revealing the magnitude of increasing deforestation to climate impacts. Therefore, curbing deforestation in indigenous territories must be a priority for the Brazilian government to secure these peoples' land rights, ensure the forests' protection and regulate the global climate.

Non

A book of photographs that centre on visualizing mining worlds, notably the worlds of artisanal and small-scale gold miners working in the Brazilian and Surinamese Amazon, and in parts of West and East Africa. Often this gold mining is portrayed in negative, stereotyped, and homogenizing ways. Since miners typically operate in the shadows of the law, their lifeways are remote from the public eye. Visualization by means of photgraphy helps bring to light the diversity of mining terrains and the close connections between miners and these terrains. Images presented in the book are the result of collaboration with gold miners for a project "Sustainability Transformations in Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: Trans-Regional and Multi-Actor Perspectives" (2018-2022).

The dashboard clock blinked 00:00. Almost mechanically, I glanced at my cell phone. It was 11:13 in the morning. After about a forty-minute drive in silence, we stepped out of the car. Gabriel had driven distractedly, glowering, and without words. I felt a bit nauseous. There had been cars everywhere, creating a sense of ordinary chaos. Earlier that morning, Gabriel had invited me to join him for lunch with his family in the countryside. I had never been to the infamous white house. So I agreed.

In this chapter, we look at Bangladesh as a constituent part of the border zone between Mainland South Asia and the Asian Highlands and argue that the Bangladesh borderland with Northeast India and Myanmar makes an interesting and necessary addition to the idea of ‘Asian Highlands’, ‘Southeast Asian Massif’, ‘Zomia’, or other qualifications for the Asian uplands. At the same time, we do acknowledge the impact of political and geographical borders on the experienced realities of local ‘highland’ communities (de facto highlanders) as well as on the highly mobile Bengali peasantry (or de facto lowlanders), who, since the first decade of the 20th century, have started moving into the forested valleys of Assam and Burma in search of new lands to cultivate. The chapter also tries to show why and how historical and ethnographic research on the roots and routes that have historically linked Bangladesh with Highland Asia have remained outside the scope of mainstream national academia in Bangladesh. Apart from its academic significance, we emphasise the political urgency to highlight the historical and ethnographic realities of the borderland(ers), who are becoming increasingly marginalised in the national discourse on citizenship and belonging.

To understand the connections between gender and violence is necessary to take into consideration the overlapping between gender and other forms of social differentiation, like class, race and ethnicity. Even though there are some improvements in terms of intersectional analysis, accounts on how cisgender and transgender women are differently affected by violence are lacking. This chapter focuses on the perspective of the transgender women about domestic violence. The discussion is theoretically framed by the literature about gender, state, violence and precariousness. The findings show that violence is translated into other registers of language in which pain can operate legibly and verbalized. Since most of the narratives are based on intimate relations with relatives, intimate partners and friends, the experiences of pain are ritualized in both silencing and joking spaces. Here, the silence is a way to cope with the continued exposition to pain, danger and death they experienced. Further, transform pain into jokes and comic stories are a way to share information about critical situations. These ritualized experiences of pain are continued bureaucratic, institutional and intimate relations that entangle suffering and gender in transgender women’s daily life.

This chapter studies a particular restaging of the European tradition of Passion plays, named The Passion, in the Netherlands. Broadcast on television, simultaneously performed live, this multimedial depiction of Christ's persecution, crucifixion and resurrection draws millions of viewers annually, since its first performance in 2011. The popularity of The Passion unfolds against anxiety about and contestations of the place of religious heritage in the Netherlands. The discourse on the relevance of The Passion as a ‘tradition’ in which a ‘universal story of connectedness’ is told, insufficiently explains its success in drawing large and diverse audiences. We introduce the notion of ‘pre-enactment’ to shed light on how the organisers attempt to invoke and control The Passion's public image and meaning. Through on- and offline ethnographic research during The Passion of 2017, we highlight strategies used by the organisers to attempt to craft its audience, often with unforeseen results.

Knowledge of the spatial distribution of the fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and their temporal variability as well as flux attribution to natural and anthropogenic processes is essential to monitoring the progress in mitigating anthropogenic emissions under the Paris Agreement and to inform its global stocktake. This study provides a consolidated synthesis of CH4 and N2O emissions using bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) approaches for the European Union and UK (EU27 + UK) and updates earlier syntheses (Petrescu et al., 2020, 2021). The work integrates updated emission inventory data, process-based model results, data-driven sector model results and inverse modeling estimates, and it extends the previous period of 1990–2017 to 2019. BU and TD products are compared with European national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) reported by parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2021. Uncertainties in NGHGIs, as reported to the UNFCCC by the EU and its member states, are also included in the synthesis. Variations in estimates produced with other methods, such as atmospheric inversion models (TD) or spatially disaggregated inventory datasets (BU), arise from diverse sources including within-model uncertainty related to parameterization as well as structural differences between models. By comparing NGHGIs with other approaches, the activities included are a key source of bias between estimates, e.g., anthropogenic and natural fluxes, which in atmospheric inversions are sensitive to the prior geospatial distribution of emissions. For CH4 emissions, over the updated 2015–2019 period, which covers a sufficiently robust number of overlapping estimates, and most importantly the NGHGIs, the anthropogenic BU approaches are directly comparable, accounting for mean emissions of 20.5 Tg CH4 yr−1 (EDGARv6.0, last year 2018) and 18.4 Tg CH4 yr−1 (GAINS, last year 2015), close to the NGHGI estimates of 17.5±2.1 Tg CH4 yr−1. TD inversion estimates give higher emission estimates, as they also detect natural emissions. Over the same period, high-resolution regional TD inversions report a mean emission of 34 Tg CH4 yr−1. Coarser-resolution global-scale TD inversions result in emission estimates of 23 and 24 Tg CH4 yr−1 inferred from GOSAT and surface (SURF) network atmospheric measurements, respectively. The magnitude of natural peatland and mineral soil emissions from the JSBACH–HIMMELI model, natural rivers, lake and reservoir emissions, geological sources, and biomass burning together could account for the gap between NGHGI and inversions and account for 8 Tg CH4 yr−1. For N2O emissions, over the 2015–2019 period, both BU products (EDGARv6.0 and GAINS) report a mean value of anthropogenic emissions of 0.9 Tg N2O yr−1, close to the NGHGI data (0.8±55 % Tg N2O yr−1). Over the same period, the mean of TD global and regional inversions was 1.4 Tg N2O yr−1 (excluding TOMCAT, which reported no data). The TD and BU comparison method defined in this study can be operationalized for future annual updates for the calculation of CH4 and N2O budgets at the national and EU27 + UK scales. Future comparability will be enhanced with further steps involving analysis at finer temporal resolutions and estimation of emissions over intra-annual timescales, which is of great importance for CH4 and N2O, and may help identify sector contributions to divergence between prior and posterior estimates at the annual and/or inter-annual scale. Even if currently comparison between CH4 and N2O inversion estimates and NGHGIs is highly uncertain because of the large spread in the inversion results, TD inversions inferred from atmospheric observations represent the most independent data against which inventory totals can be compared. With anticipated improvements in atmospheric modeling and observations, as well as modeling of natural fluxes, TD inversions may arguably emerge as the most powerful tool for verifying emission inventories for CH4, N2O and other GHGs. The referenced datasets related to figures are visualized at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7553800 (Petrescu et al., 2023).

Middle-class parents in China are increasingly torn between the need to secure their child's future in an environment where competition starts in kindergarten and parenting ideologies focusing on the child's individuality, creativity and freedom. Our study, based on ethnographic fieldwork among middle-class Chinese migrants in Budapest, shows that one result of this tension is a new wave of emigration that is justified in terms of securing a relaxed, healthy and free environment for the child. These migrants consciously reject what they see as a materialistic and dehumanizing social environment in China and pursue a “European” lifestyle that they imagine as wholesome and human-centred; yet while they rejoice in the “happiness” of their children, they retain a deep-seated anxiety about their children's future. Thus, the search for a mentally and physically wholesome environment consonant with China's discourse of national revitalization becomes decoupled from its original agenda and triggers a new trend in international mobility. This study illustrates how the broader tensions in the relationship between China's middle class and the state are externalized to the global stage.

Majlis sermons are a cornerstone of Shia ritual, and the online growth of this practice, mostly as videos, poses challenges for majlis preachers and audiences. This article explores Dutch Shias' experiences of majalis ethnographically and considers how they vary online and offline. Practitioners seek experiences of authentication in majalis - meaningful, truthful, emotional and legitimising experiences. Majlis preachers aim to create experiences of authentication. This text considers how such experiences occur through registers of authentication, explored as re-memory, embodiment and discourse. These registers are employed by preachers of the majlis sermon and recognised by audiences to produce highly affective religious experiences. However, online contexts pose challenges as ways of eliciting registers of authentication shift. This article describes these shifts to explore the implications for Shia practices. Keywords

Social analyses have often conceptualized small-scale mining as a poverty-pushed economy that offers a social safety net to downtrodden populations. While not discarding the importance of this proposition, I argue that the commonplace notion of "poverty-driven" mining draws attention away from the socio-cultural and material particularities that inform resource extraction in specific times and places. In an attempt to foreground these particularities, I examine ethnographically the not-quite-economic factors that enable small-scale gold mining in the Colombian region of Chocó. Inspired by the conversations I held with chocoano miners, I approach small-scale mining through the notion of "empirical work." When miners described to me their labor and knowledge as "empirical," they alluded to the fact that their mining skills and sensibilities had resulted from practice—from their own long-term engagement with the goldfields. With "empirical work," thus, we may think of a form of mining labor that is intrinsically grounded in environmental experience and originates from miners' enmeshment in particular social and cultural lifeworlds. Although emergent within wider structures of inequality, the notion of empirical work draws explicit attention to the spatial, temporal, and social situatedness of mining. Accordingly, it highlights that gold extraction in Chocó, while most certainly taking place in a regional context of poverty, also constitutes an intrinsically moral economy that is articulated through narratives of luck, danger, environmental destruction, and community.

This themed section aims to examine the offline implications of a thriving online nationalist culture fostered by various social media platforms. Several studies have concluded that social media have enhanced nationalism, but there is still a significant lacuna in understanding the deep social, political, and cultural transformations produced by online platforms. How is nationalism different in the digital age? How do nationalists harness the transnational character of social media to disseminate and channel their message simultaneously to various cultural groups? How is the message composed and translated to appeal to various groups, and how does nationalist content cross language and cultural boundaries? The papers that make up this themed section explore the transnational aspects of digital cultures and provide new insights into the methodological difficulties of understanding the offline impact of the contents of social media.

In this article I examine a recent communal cocoa planting project in a Wide Bay Mengen community in East Pomio, Papua New Guinea in relation to histories of resource extraction. I discuss how the community members modeled the current planting of cocoa in accordance with earlier forms of agriculture, namely copra production and swidden horticulture. The cocoa planting project is linked to a longer history of labour and resource extraction in Pomio. I analyze the cycles of labour recruitment, logging, and oil palm expansion through the framework of the frontier, by which I mean a spatio-temporal process through which certain areas are portrayed as having abundant resources, which are made available for extraction. The cocoa planting project was a local response to these conditions and intended to be a source of income based on inalienated labour and local landholding and a spatial strategy of establishing points of access to other places, called 'doors' by the community members. My aim in this article is twofold. First, I argue that the frontier understood as a spatio-temporal process helps us to conceptualize cycles of resource extraction. Second, I show how people living in areas understood as frontiers form their own analyses and responses to the conditions under which their land, labour, and resources are made available to others. Keywords: cocoa, commodification, frontier, infrastructure, natural resources, oil palm, Papua New Guinea, place, territorialization

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life. Non

Non

Hope for a messianic future and the Messiah’s return emerge from everyday life negotiations of some Iranians within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic has co-opted the religion, messianic hope and the Messiah to build a mode of religious governance and to maintain pro-regime families and the revolu-tionary youth. I will demonstrate politics of hope in Iran and argue that subscribing to the messianic hope by pro-regime families may appear as a religious expression of futurity or compliance with the Islamic Republic at first glance. However, messianic hope is a mode of world-making to endure militancy, militarization of everyday life, political Islam and the pain caused by a stream of dead bodies coming from different conflict zones. This article builds on the existing debates of hope to show how the reality of ‘the future’ becomes messianic for Shia believers and how social actors carving hope amidst precarities is not an orientation towards the future but rather a mode of making-do.

This introduction provides an initial approach to the conceptual framework of infrastructural harm. It draws upon existing scholarship to discuss infrastructures as relational arrangements co-formative of harm. By approaching infrastructures as sites of ongoing socio-political and environmental antagonism, we pay attention to the ways in which infrastructural harm is generated, accretes, and transmutes across different scales and contexts. We consider harm as a process that exceeds the (in)direct consequences of infrastructure operation to extend to other arrangements. Building upon the diverse case studies discussed in this special issue, we investigate how the political and necropolitical properties of infrastructures are entangled with different technologies, judicial forms, policies, regulations and everyday processes. By foregrounding these diverse manifestations of infrastructural harm, together with its material and immaterial expressions, we expand on the existing literature in order to further explore critical codifications of contemporary socio-technical arrangements.

This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes of uncertainty, interruption, and (in)visibility. By paying attention to the infrastructural contestation surrounding Fyli landfill, we conceptualize waste infrastructures as techno-political devices that engender harm. Our paper, first, examines the ways in which the spatio-temporal modalities of harm play out within this context, and secondly, rethinks modes of contestation and (in)visibility in relation to urban infrastructures. It argues that thinking through harm further elaborates the complex enmeshment between spatio-temporal and moral dynamics of infrastructures and forms of disruption, accountability, and participation. Hence, while we rethink waste infrastructures through harm, we also attend to the infrastructural codifications of harm.

This dissertation focuses on the reconfiguration of bordering and migration practices in Greece triggered by the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement in March 2016 as a culmination of a series of political decisions on migrations aimed to address what was labelled a ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. Such measures form part of the EU’s migration management, through practices of securitization of borders and humanitarian intervention. One of the consequences resulting from these political decisions is that a division was created between individuals who had reached Greece prior to that date and those who arrived afterwards. This division subjected migrants to distinct border and mobility regimes that materialized as different levels of access to the international protection system and the kind of humanitarian assistance envisaged by the Statement. I approached the topic by examining the humanitarian intervention provided to newcomers, utilizing as an observation point a local non-governmental organization to explore how the measures are translated on the ground into the daily practices of humanitarian care. Building on the differing management of migration systems generated by the new measure according to geographical location – mainland and islands – I conducted my fieldwork research between April 2018 and May 2019 on a small southeastern Aegean island, Tilos, and in Athens on the mainland, in an accommodation facility and a centre that provides integrated services respectively. The findings collected in both field sites ultimately indicate that the ‘refugee crisis’, attributed to the numerous arrivals, materializes instead in the reception system and the way in which migration is managed.

In this article, I seek to make meaning of small-scale mining landscapes that are not only the object, but also the subject of politics. More specifically, I explore how in Colombia, the physical world of informalized small-scale miners (their technology, topography, and geology) mediates their relationship with the state bureaucracy. While drawing from ethnographic literature on “clandestine” and “natural” infrastructures, I maintain that tunnels, excavators, dredges, mountains, and forests are politically charged matter that enable miners not only to extract minerals, but also to keep such prohibited work hidden from state agents—or at least, to keep those agents at bay. Thus, unlike conventional analyses of small-scale mining, I invoke miners’ relationship with their work environment, not as one more argument of why they should or should not be included in political formations, but instead to contend that they already participate in politics, albeit often outside the formal channels of liberal democracy.

deutsch: Workshop 1: Angst, Einsamkeit und unsichtbare Kämpfe; Frauen und Männer in der Obdachlosigkeit Luisa Schneider hat die Lebensrealität von obdachlosen Frauen beforscht und stellt Forschungsergebnisse vor, die auch konkrete Einzelbeispiele beinhalten. Akteure aus der gemeindepsychiatrischen Versorgung Leipzigs berichten von den Schwierigkeiten der Obdachlosenhilfe und diskutieren mögliche Unterstützungswege sowie gemeinsame Projekte mit der Wohnungslosenhilfe der Stadt Leipzig. English: Referent:innen: Luisa T. Schneider, Karola Seidler, Dyrk Zedlick Workshop 1: Fear, Loneliness and Invisible Struggles; Women and Men in Homelessness. Luisa Schneider has researched the experiences of houseless women's lives and presents research findings that include specific individual examples. Stakeholders from Leipzig's community mental health services will report on the difficulties of helping the houseless and discuss possible avenues of support as well as joint projects with the City of Leipzig's houseless services. Speakers: Luisa T. Schneider, Karola Seidler, Dyrk Zedlick

The chronic absence of combat is central to deployment experience for Argentinian Army personnel, and serves as a lens to explore ethical life from a military perspective, not as a fixed set of military virtues, yet as an evolving moral project grounded in everyday ambiguities around humanitarian militarism. Combining a historical analysis of state repression and institutional reform with ethnographic fieldwork with Argentinian members of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, this article shows how present-day Argentinian military ideals and aspirations change, overlap, and awkwardly sit together while being a ‘beachkeeper’. Due to far-reaching military curtailment and precarious working conditions that are both related to legacies of authoritarianism, even the potential of combat is no longer a possibility for the Argentinian Army. Through the analysis of both ethnographic observations and interviews with mid-career Argentinian officers, this article suggests that because of a chronic inaccessibility to military virtues (such as thrill, manliness, and toughness), participating in humanitarian assistance does not provoke military boredom nor a moral failure to become a competent and virtuous warrior. Being involved in light peacekeeping is rather a form of survival from a social death in a society that has largely turned its back to its armed forces, while at the same time it is an expression of their institutional limitations. This article concludes by suggesting how the ethical turn in anthropology can critically address the absence of combat as a productive force for a non-violent ethic without fixing military virtue in stone.

Berhijab (to wear a veil) is the custom of the majority of Muslim women in Indonesia. In the Qur’ān, Surah An-Nur verse 31 says women should cover their heads and their chests and Surah Al Ahzab verse 59 says women should drape their cloaks over themselves. However, the Qur’ān does not indicate exactly how the headscarf should be worn nor does it prescribe what colour or what form it should be, whether it should cover just the head or also the chest or even more of the body. Consequently, there are many variations in the way that women wear a hijab in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world for that matter. In my PhD research, carried out in the city of Surabaya, the second biggest city in Indonesia, I found various Muslim women’s groups uniting themselves into groups whose members have adopted the same hijab style. For instance, the Kemayu Academy members follow the developments in global fashion and therefore follow the trends in their hijab practices. They interpret the Quranic prescription liberally; they might even display their hijab preferences in fashion shows as their main economic activity. The members of another group, the Academic Muslim Women’s Group, follow a more literal interpretation of Qur’ān and translate the text directly into contemporary hijab styles, or they link their hijab style to certain Islamic political convictions. There is also the Hijabers Mom Community whose members combine global fashion trends with regard to hijab with strict Islamic rules. Members of Nurul Faizah combine hijab styles with local traditional dress (for example, Javanese traditional clothing). Together, I call these widely differing styles we come across in Indonesia, and there are more, ‘hijab practices’, which I define as the common denominator by which to denote the different ways in which Muslim women in Indonesia dress and give meaning to their hijab. To understand hijab practices properly, it is important to make the distinction between different styles, because they do actually communicate different things. Different styles communicate the ways in which women think about their religion and how they want to shape their religious practices and activities in everyday life in a variety of contexts. These activities include work, academic activities, social life in the public sphere, leisure, interpretation of religious beliefs and aspects of indoor, private life (Kloos, 2015). In this regard, I also include the issues of class, global fashion, consumerism and the use of social media as part and parcel of everyday activities, because they are all essential to a good understanding of the hijab practices I address. In short, the aim of my study is to describe and analyse the diversity of hijab practices in Indonesia, and in the city of Surabaya in particular, and to explain this diversity in terms of the various choices which women make. Muslim women’s opinions and activities and the position of women in society constitute an integral part of the general dynamics of Islam in contemporary Indonesia and are an important angle from which to study these dynamics. By choosing this perspective, I can explore various modes of agency of women and the situations in which this agency is revealed.

Narratives, stories and memories of pasts mutate through times, politics and sociocultural practices. The mute-ability of past is a visible trend in post-war societies like Iran, where the state apparatus operates incessantly as a memory machine. However, muting the past cannot be limited to the state as a political actor. I have explored the role of social actors in sociocultural processes that mute the pasts. I draw from my ethnographic encounters and fieldwork among Iranian revolutionary youth who display commitment to political Islam and armed resistance to explain how social actors consume memories of past conflicts and contribute to muting/mutating histories. I argue the mute-ability of a past is not about changes and transformation of the past but about what social actors do with the past and how they render it mute to manage the present era. An exploration of mute-ability and how pasts are rendered silent is required, via an anthropology of history/past to show agency in compliance and agentive capacities of people in shaping the past from the present era. This article explores how remembering works when forgetting is not an option and the remembrance of martyrdom is the standard of civic piety in Iran.

Discussions about young people and their troubled education-to-work transitions in the global south usually concern urban case studies, in which young people are typically described as if they are outside the normal flow of things. By contrast, this current paper focuses on rural tertiary-educated young people (aged 20–30) on the island of Flores, East Indonesia. These young people try – and are enabled by their communities – to act as responsible community members through what they called ‘having semangat’, a term connoting commitment and spiritedness, being lively and passionate. The analysis of having semangat stimulates us to rethink the common link between young people and upward mobility, and contests an image of young people as potential social failures who direct themselves to the margins when they fail to comply with hegemonic ideals of success.

Marriage migrant women are vulnerable to forms of partner violence, particularly in the first five years after migration to the Netherlands because of their dependence on their partner for residence rights. This article, based on qualitative research amongst Moroccan marriage migrant women in the Netherlands and women who have been left behind in Morocco, examines their position and analyses how legal regulations and residence dependency on the one hand, and the integration process on the other hand, play a role in cases of intimate partner violence. This qualitative research cannot offer figures about intimate partner violence and is not representative for couples with migrant origin in general, nor for migrants from Moroccan origin. The aim is to examine the relation between dependence residence rights and intimate partner violence.

Climate change represents a profound challenge to the lives and livelihoods of (agro)-pastoralists, who are acutely dependent on natural and nature-based resources. Adapting to climate change is becoming increasingly important for maintaining livelihoods and ensuring sustainable development. With this dissertation, I have investigated to what extent local communities have adapted to climate change and whether, and if so, how large-scale development projects have influenced their adaptation efforts and overall food security status. The analysis was based on the perspectives of agro-pastoralists, using the vivid example of the Nyangatom district as an increasingly popular tourist destination, and recently becoming a hotspot for large-scale agricultural investment in the lower Omo valley. The study takes the Salamago and Dassanech development projects as a showcase, each reflecting similar livelihood options and strategies. The research area presents a complicated situation as this part of the Ethiopian lowland area was subject to extremely rapid agricultural development (mainly for biofuel production) and dam construction, which, combined with climate change, left little room for sustainable use of pastoral resources. The lower Omo valley is just one example of many other pastoral areas in the country that face challenges from climate change, conflict, and changes in land use and land cover. In addition, the participation of local communities in decision-making about pastoral development was limited. Common development strategies previously applied were transforming pastoral livelihoods through sedentarization and promoting large-scale agriculture, such as state-sponsored sugarcane plantations, in pastoral lands. As a result, the livelihoods of the agro-pastoralists were threatened, and the pastoralists fell victim to the over-popularity of the area, leading to competition for land and water resources. The high demand for the use of natural resources was accompanied by differing views (and underlying interests) from stakeholders about what kind of developments were desired and how these resources should be used. The study provides an insight into pastoralism and agro-pastoralism as practiced in the lower Omo valley, i.e., an area where climate variability and change and conflict dynamics are seriously affecting the lives of pastoralists. The thesis contextualizes the importance of pastoral production in line with the ‘socio-ecological’ system in arid and semi-arid environments based on the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response framework. The latter represents a chain of causal links starting with ‘driving forces’ through ‘pressures’ to ‘states’ and ‘impacts’ on ecosystems, human health, and functions, eventually leading to political ‘responses’. Data were collected through socio-economic surveys, community discussions, field observations, and local weather stations. The household surveys covered 424 randomly selected households from three sites: the Nyangatom (90%), Salamago (5%), and Dassanech (5%) districts. Both spatio-temporal analyses of remote sensing imagery and mobility models were used to investigate livestock mobility strategies and fodder supply-demand balances under conditions of climate change and land use and land cover change. Based on my research, I conclude that the Lower Omo Valley, especially the Nyangatom area, has development potential if the empowerment of pastoralists and the sustainable use of natural resources are facilitated, and if social institutions are respected and livelihood strategies can incorporate the risks of climate variability and change. Additional research is strongly recommended for a better understanding of the economic and ecosystem impacts associated with large-scale agriculture and for a better context-specific understanding of the significant impact of uncontrolled development activities in the valley. Stakeholder perceptions, social and cultural analysis, especially socio-ecological studies for the management of arid environments should receive much more attention. To this end, further studies could explore the question of how to create the best enabling environments for enhancing the socio-economic autonomy of agro-pastoralists, thereby recognizing their agency.

This article draws from a social representations approach (SRA) to present a qualitative inquiry of identity construction in interaction and as part of the social context. We argue that the concept of positioning, inherent to our understanding of SRA, provides a bridge between social representations and identities. Focusing on societally marginalised groups and with illustrative interview samples gathered from two different studies in Finland, this article aims to show how people who use hard drugs position themselves within dominating social representations of 'addict', 'junkie' and 'polydrug user'. Two ways of positioning are employed to negotiate with negative social representations: resistance and partial acceptance. 'Distancing from the worst' as a way of positioning characterises resistance and illustrates how a positive identity is constructed by describing the 'ingroup other' in negative ways, enabling justification of why the responded is not like that. In contrast, 'facing the inescapable' as a way of positioning illustrates partial acceptance that is engaged when people feel they cannot control their use or their lives more generally and cannot justify another position than that of a prototypical user. Our article advances the literature on the role of positioning within representational fields as enabling individuals to reject, challenge or accept the dominating social representations, while at the same time serving as a resource to cope with identity threats and maintain a positive identity.

This article presents the value of ethnography for researching the non-medical aspects of care provided by midwives to women during labour.

This study assesses the impact of a large, state-sponsored sugar plantation scheme on agro-pastoralists’ livelihoods and local land use change in southern Ethiopia, specifically in the lower Omo Valley. The study compares the local perceptions on the ongoing Omo-Kuraz sugar project — sugar cane plantations and a cane-crushing factory — and describes how it has affected local communities’ environmental and livelihood strategies vis-à-vis the alleged ‘new development opportunities’. Focus group discussion, key informant interviews, and field observations were applied to get in-depth information about the socio-economic and environmental impacts of large scale land acquisitions. The results show that the implementation of large scale land acquisitions in the lower Omo Valley has put enormous pressure on local land use and land management systems. The Omo-Kuraz I and II projects, started in 2011, neither met the stated economic purposes of the then Ethiopian federal government nor satisfied the pastoral communities’ needs. The LSAI project is still highly contentious among the local community, the project office, and the local government. Our study recommends that shifting the perspective towards the local agro-pastoralists’ activities, understanding their views and ways of ‘using’ the environment, and creating a broader consultation platform with them may create opportunities for cooperation and synergy to optimize benefits and sustainably adapt the development project to the local context.

Scholarship on publics has proliferated during the past two decades, especially in linguistic anthropology. Drawing on Michael Warner's famous formulation, publics are now routinely theorized as a social form predicated on the reflexive circulation of discourse. This article, however, identifies a tension within Warner's conception of publics. On the one hand, Warner levels a critique of liberal publicity, noting its exclusions and contradictions, but on the other hand, he models his own account of publics on the liberal public sphere and assumptions of voluntaristic, free speech. Working from ethnographic research on a government-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in Macedonia, the article develops a different perspective on publics and their politics. It examines how practices of marketing and strategic communication now pervade public spheres and valorize not voluntaristic participation but discursive engineering, that is, concerted efforts to determine how discourse can and will circulate in some public. When tethered to projects of centralized political control, as happened in Macedonia during Nikola Gruevski's prime ministership (2006-2016), practices of discursive engineering can result in enclosed public spheres. Ultimately, the article asks, what can attention to elite efforts to engineer and enclose public spheres teach about struggles over participation in contemporary contexts of mass publicity?