This article proposes that stigmas connected to social categories of exclusion prevalent during life extend into dealings with the dead, here referred to as ‘necro‐ostracism’, in the context of death and burial of Muslim nomadic populations in urban Afghanistan. Based on qualitative fieldwork carried out in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar‐e Sharif, it explores how the unequal status of pastoral and peripatetic

Activists fighting evictions in Madrid develop various social, affective, and material connections with and disconnections from their homes. This is especially important for people who are immersed in a regime of economic austerity and neoliberal housing policies that have provoked the social and material unmaking and remaking of homes. These processes take place and are performed through the making

In coastal Bangladesh, ‘affective assemblages of kinship’ produce differential abilities for landless single mothers to migrate to brick kilns, the garment industry, and the Gulf. This group of women who return to their natal homes as a response to violence or abandonment is neglected by anthropologists of kinship and migration. Thinking of assemblages of kinship as open‐ended gatherings enables us

In this article, I examine practices of social detachment among West African migrants in urban Ghana. Faced with pressures arising from expectations of reciprocity, especially from kin back home, some migrants exert considerable efforts to break, if temporarily, with relations of mutual recognition and support, entering what I term migratory aloneness. Far from being an individualizing endeavour linked

This article explores Christian principles, imagery, and ideas shaping the (re)making of masculine ideals, behaviour, and identities among Pentecostal Gitanos in Spain. Scholarship on Pentecostal masculinities emphasizes that in cultural settings dominated by ‘macho’ and other chauvinistic principles, men find it challenging to comply with Pentecostal standards of manhood, and those who do convert

Embedded within Japan's demographic and economic stagnation, traditional craftsmanship unexpectedly aligns with the discourse of creativity. This study delves into the intricacies of this convergence through ethnographic details, shedding light on how endeavours to preserve local crafts intertwine with the burgeoning discourse of creativity within public policy frameworks, thereby shaping a nuanced

In Uganda, the ‘traditional’ wedding, wherein a groom brings money and gifts to his father‐in‐law's home, has long been understood as the ultimate demonstration of a man's social maturity. Yet masculine adulthood is becoming increasingly elusive as weddings become more difficult to afford. Widespread unemployment has rendered most young men unable to fund the rituals while weddings themselves have

This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re‐examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering

Recent studies suggest that race is no longer viewed as a biological category by most anthropologists in the United States, but less empirical work has been carried out in other countries. In this study, we engaged the Polish academic community in anthropology (biological and cultural) and biology by conducting surveys to assess how its members approach and conceptualize race in these disciplines.

This article investigates an increasingly observable yet insufficiently studied phenomenon: the emphasis placed by artists on personal experience as the most legitimate inspiration for art. To this end, I introduce the term ‘sincere realism’ to describe an emerging form of personal cinema in Israel, illustrating how sincerity has evolved into a dominant ‘regime of truth’ that moulds modern forms of

Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam have centred on the relationship between ‘everyday Islam’ and ‘piety’. Some scholars have posited that these are two opposing theoretical poles, while others have described how religion permeates the everyday. I add to these debates by describing how, for one group of young Turkish‐American Muslim women in a piety movement, the everyday permeates religion

This article focuses on subsurface materiality to explore how small‐scale gold miners in Colombia navigate formal politics. In much critical research, the underground appears as a space of great developmentalist ambition, whose resources enable corporate expansion and bureaucratic rule. Here I take a slightly different route, as I demonstrate that subterranean matter makes possible ways of knowing

This article interrogates relations between dual senses of economics as ‘discipline’: as a form of knowledge and as a form of training. Scholars have suggested that economics performatively brings homo economicus into being. Yet this has been often posited as a singular figure, while eclipsing the unequal forms of personhood and sociality it instantiates. Through ethnography of elite undergraduate

There have been plenty of interpretations regarding the meaning and function of sacrifice within the discipline of anthropology. Going beyond sacrifice as a ritual and exploring a wide range of its manifestations and functions as contemporary cultural practices, discourses, and underlying logics, we reveal its role in the social organization of social care provision within the framework of neoliberal

This article explores how a displaced Papua New Guinean people decided to lease their customary land for oil palm plantation farming to restore their land use rights and resolve ongoing disputes with migrant settlers. By transforming the landscape into a territorialized space as a plantation, Kairak‐speaking Baining hoped to gain actual landownership status and control over their land, which in turn

Vivir bien is widely used by academics, activists, and governments of the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ to refer to alternatives to conventional economic development based on indigenous worldviews claimed to oppose capitalist modernity. Through ethnography of local politics within a Bolivian Quechua community, this article explores how the term has been vernacularized and contested among local leaders

Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state‐in‐exile have sought to assert their claims to Western Sahara, Africa's last colony, while exiled in refugee camps in Algeria. Through an examination of the Sahrawi state's use of deferred natural resource contracts, this article explores Sahrawi political action prior to – and in anticipation of – the referendum on self‐determination. I suggest that Sahrawi‐led

Since the mid‐1990s, in clandestine co‐operation with state agencies, West Bank settlers have been establishing what have become known as the illegal outpost settlements. These are typically rustic communities located deep inside the frontier. Publicly, outpost residents insist that they want the state to retroactively legalize their communities. This is also the long‐sought goal of the leaders of

Peer influence in adolescence and early adulthood is critical to the formation of beliefs about appropriate behaviour for each gender. Complicating matters, recent studies suggest that men overestimate peer support for inequitable gender norms. Combined with social conformity, this susceptibility to ‘norm misperception’ may represent a barrier to women's empowerment. However, why men misperceive peer

This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the ‘truth’ might

Scholarly and public debate on the urban commons is burgeoning, but building exteriors and the cityscape these constitute are surprisingly absent from it, despite their considerable significance for and impact on residents and visitors. After reflecting on the cityscape as a commons, the article turns to Kyoto, the former capital of Japan and acclaimed stronghold of history and tradition. Decades of

Throughout the twentieth century, in the Soninke‐speaking area of West Africa, women sang to praise migrants and mock immobile men, before such songs were abandoned at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. These songs have commonly been read as reinforcing a normative order of migration whereby migration functioned as proof of manhood. The study of an original corpus, collected by a radio station

Trade on the Iriri River, in the eastern Brazilian Amazonia, is structured around a credit‐barter system between clients and bosses known as aviamento in Portuguese. Nowadays, bosses are river traders born in the riversides who offer goods on credit to riverside dwellers, who later pay these debts with fish and products they collect from the forest. While the system, found in the Amazon basin since

This article focuses on the ‘enchanted’ materiality of state militarism by offering an anthropological analysis of ‘gun culture’ within the reservist ranks of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Through primarily ethnographic observations of one reserve combat unit over the span of a decade, we will argue that the ways in which firearms are handled by individual soldiers symbolically mirrors much broader

This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, ‘post‐traditional’ contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan