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Citizenship beyond solidarity and belonging American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-19 Ayşe Çağlar
The authors in this forum highlight collective action that gives way to new scripts of citizenship. This collective action also opens new spaces of common life, where people can perform the politics of being with others. I ask whether the concepts of commoning and sociability, rather than the language of solidarity and belonging, would be more suitable to capture the dynamics of contemporary citizenship
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Spaces and challenges of citizenship American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-19 Heide Castañeda
This commentary engages the articles in the “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum by discussing three points: citizen participation in and challenges to bureaucratic practices; the spatialities of citizenship and belonging; and the potentials for co‐optation of civic mobilization vis‐à‐vis the privatization of state responsibilities. It concludes that citizen mobilizations can effectively
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Citizenship, agency, and the problem of sovereignty American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-19 Rebecca Bryant
This commentary asks what would change about the analyses in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum if the state were not assumed as the background. Using research on unrecognized states and their citizens, the commentary urges a return to the problem of sovereignty that takes seriously the desires that sovereignty evokes. Doing so, it argues, can help us understand the shape that political
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Citizenship thinking—with, against, and bypassing the state American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-19 Sian Lazar
This short commentary argues for the utility of a suitably expansive idea of citizenship, one that opens complex terrains for analysis: where citizens work with, against, and alongside the state, and where state power is enabled and sidestepped through multiple embodied processes. I consider the nature of the citizen‐state encounter in each article in AE’s “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging”
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Volumetric citizenship American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Eli Elinoff
In Thailand, the volatile period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by changing material and political atmospheres. Air pollution, the COVID‐19 pandemic, and government restrictions on speech transformed how Thai citizens breathed and how they related to the monarchy. Understanding this period as a history of breath reconceptualizes the citizen‐body as volumetric, recasting politics as an intermaterial practice
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Refusals of noncitizenship American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-25 Peter Nyers
This commentary explores the politics of refusal as it plays out in struggles for citizenship. Refusals of noncitizenship involve a dialectic of negation and affirmation. They are at once acts of protest against an injustice or wrong, while also generative of new forms of political subjectivity and community. The refusals of noncitizenship found in the articles of this special forum involve acts of
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The current economy: Electricity markets and techno‐economics By CanayÖzden‐Schilling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 205 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Dean Chahim
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What does it mean to be a citizen in the contemporary moment? American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Neha Vora
This commentary on the set of articles for the “Citizenship, Solidarity, and Nonbelonging” forum considers ways that relationships between states and residents are being reconfigured in the wake of environmental, technological, and economic changes. It also questions the concept of liberal citizenship as a framework for understanding contemporary political subjectivity.
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Corrections to “Managing the ‘hot spots’: Health care, policing, and the governance of poverty in the US” American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-25
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Being dead otherwise By Anne Allison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 256 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Shunsuke Nozawa
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A history of false hope: Investigative commissions in Palestine By LoriAllen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 432 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Hilla Dayan
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Gendered fortunes: Divination, precarity, and affect in postsecular Turkey By Zeynep K. Korkman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 276 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Tatiana Rabinovich
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Meaningless citizenship: Iraqi refugees and the welfare state By Sally WesleyBonet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 256 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Zachary Sheldon
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Zar: Spirit possession, music, and healing rituals in Egypt By Hager ElHadidi. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016. 180 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 John Schaefer
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A book of waves By Stefan Helmreich. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 411 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Ignacio Farías, Brett Mommersteeg
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The feel of algorithms By MinnaRuckenstein. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. 223 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Spencer Kaplan
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Composing violence: The limits of exposure and the making of minorities By MoyukhChatterjee. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 184 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Suvir Kaul
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Passport entanglements: Protection, care, and precarious migrations By Nicole Constable. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 260 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Mahmoud Keshavarz
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A filtered life: Social media on a college campus By Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter. New York: Routledge, 2022. 210 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Patricia G. Lange
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Native agency: Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs By Valerie Lambert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 376 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-11 Jason Younker
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Productive leisure on the farm American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-20 Camille Frazier
In the context of deepening national concern about the future of farming in India, professionals in Bengaluru's (Bangalore's) booming information technology and related industries are purchasing agricultural land at the edges of the city and farming in their free time. These “techie farmers” invest their money and time in cultivation either (1) to generate idealized agrarian traditions and aesthetics
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Ritual as image American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Aarti Sethi
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the central Indian cotton belt, I examine two historical moments: (1) the expansion of agrarian capitalism and absorption of market logics into the peasant household in the colonial period; and (2) changes in seed technology and gendered labor required for cultivating hybrid cotton in the postcolonial era. Through these transformations, cotton farmers have maintained
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A ritual geology: Gold and subterranean knowledge in Savanna West Africa By Robyn d'Avignon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 304 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Tom Özden‐Schilling
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Gut anthro: An experiment in thinking with microbes By Amber Benezra. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 282 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 Andrea Ford
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Birding under fire American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Bridget Guarasci
Birding for nature conservation becomes violent in war when foreign states and industry use it to extract value from countries like Iraq. In wartime Iraq, birding became a pathway to multinational resource extraction by producing “eco-value,” a form of economic value for species life and, by extension, the ecosystems they inhabit. Iraqi marshland conservationists, including private contractors, produced
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Something in these hills: The culture of family land in southern Appalachia By John M. Coggeshall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 238 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 William Schumann
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Genres of listening: An ethnography of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires By Xochitl Marsilli‐Vargas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 248 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Sergio E. Visacovsky
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The situation of the interface American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Timothy P. A. Cooper
A master copy is an artifact whose quality or value carries over to the copies it engenders. In the United Arab Emirates, home to a marketplace trade in Pashto-language film and music, master copy also refers to the context of the artifact's accessibility; it describes a print made from a medium—such as a celluloid film, an audiocassette, or a vinyl record—considered to hold the earliest or highest-quality
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The sexual politics of empire: Postcolonial homophobia in Haiti By Erin L.Durban. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 234 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Dasha A. Chapman
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“Punching is a sickness” American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Leo Hopkinson
Men who box professionally in Accra recognize that bouts are physically harmful and that they involve violently subordinating one another. Yet they also share a sense that bouts can be spaces of mutual becoming and affirmation. To navigate the tension between harm and affirmation, boxers and coaches couch their work between the ropes in idioms of care and mutual support. These idioms reflect their
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Visible critique/critical visibility American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Elizabeth Derderian
Artists based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are pressured by international art elites to critique the illiberal regime under which they live. But doing so is illegal. It can lead the state to retaliate with harassment, detention, cancellation of residency visas, and expulsion. Nonetheless, gatekeeping curators and critics validate UAE-based artists’ work as worthwhile and good if these artists
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Fiat speech, fiat infrastructure American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Judith Bovensiepen
In 2011 the independent government of Timor-Leste initiated a controversial oil and gas infrastructure project. To persuade Timorese citizens to embrace their vision of the future based on oil and gas, supporters of the project employed narrative strategies conventionally reserved for ritual authorities. Their scaling of ritual speech to the level of the nation hinged on establishing iconic links across
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¡Alerta! Engineering on shaky ground By ElizabethReddy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 215 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Lisa Messeri
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Anthropology with a philosophical sensibility American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Eraldo Souza dos Santos
While philosophy and anthropology have much to say to each other, they do not always mesh in productive ways. Critically reflecting on an edited volume that seeks to bring insights from philosophy to anthropological analysis, I consider how the volume's form, while didactic, may contribute to the reproduction of power dynamics that both anthropologists and philosophers have denounced. More broadly
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Pig-feast democracy American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Veronika Kusumaryati
In most Melanesian societies, pig feasts have been declining in recent years, owing to the incursion of Christianity and the modern economy. But in Indonesia-occupied West Papua, pig feasts are being held more often, and at a greater scale, than ever. The feasts are taking place in the context of West Papua's “special autonomy” status and Indonesia's democratic reforms, which have established direct
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Situating microbes American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Timothy Gitzen
Microbes are relational, and they foster multispecies relationality. In both mundane and profound ways, they connect, interlace, and affect bodies, and are affected by them in turn. This comes to the fore in two recent ethnographic volumes that interrogate microbial worlds: The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, by Jamie Lorimer, and With Microbes, edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthaus Rest
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Flexible families: Nicaraguan transnational families in Costa Rica By CaitlinFouratt. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022. 181 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-25 Lynnette Arnold
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Thanks for watching: An anthropological study of video sharing on YouTube By Patricia G.Lange. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019. 362 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Daniel Miller
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Mafiacraft: An ethnography of deadly silence By DeborahPuccio‐Den. Chicago: Hau Books, 2021. 294 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Antonio Vesco
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Without the state: Self‐organization and political activism in Ukraine By EmilyChannell‐Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 302 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Emma Mateo
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Experimenting with ethnography: A companion to analysis By AndreaBallestero and Brit RossWinthereik, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 301 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Fulya Pinar
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Sextarianism: Sovereignty, secularism, and the state in Lebanon By MayaMikdashi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ola Galal
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Food allergy advocacy: Parenting and the politics of care By Danya Glabau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 296 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Matthew Pappalardo, Holly Horan
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Chemical heroes: Pharmacological supersoldiers in the US military By Andrew Bickford. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Traben Pleasant
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Fat in four cultures—a global ethnography of weight By CindiSturtzSreetharan, AlexandraBrewis, JessicaHardin, SarahTrainer, and AmberWutich. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 236 pp. American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Fernanda Baeza Scagliusi
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Anthropology unbound American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Saira A. Mehmood
As an anthropologist currently working in the policy realm, I provide insights on the value of anthropology and its potential for growth and impact, both within and beyond academia. Drawing from my experiences studying in graduate school, teaching in academia, and holding nonacademic jobs, I suggest that anthropology can flourish by breaking free from disciplinary boundaries and silos, challenging
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The maturing of anthropology American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Daniel Miller
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
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A view from another side, or, not just another quit-lit essay American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Lori A. Allen
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
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Translating the social in complex technology development American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Melissa Cefkin
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
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The smugness of privilege American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Don Kulick
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
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Seeing our world in 16:9 aspect ratio American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Charles Menzies
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.
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Why do I write anthropology? Why do you? American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Alma Gottlieb
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
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Anthropology and complicated people American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Alexander Edmonds
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
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Becoming malleable American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Michele Friedner, Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including “the field” and “the anthropology seminar.” Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a
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Ethnography vs. zombie methodologies American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Greg Downey
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
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Privileged observers and colonial continuities American Ethnologist (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Maia Green
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