Anthropology Today最新文献

Health and social services in Italy frequently essentialize migrant women's reproductive choices as products of ‘culture’ rather than responses to structural barriers, precarious conditions or institutional failures of listening. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Verona in 2018 – including focus groups and interviews with both practitioners and migrant women – this article analyses how, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, reproductive health services ‘think’. Practitioners’ narratives reveal persistent patterns of infantilization and cultural stereotyping, while migrant women's testimonies point to experiences of obstetrical violence and alienation. Yet some street-level bureaucrats resist these institutional logics, opening space for more reflexive care practices.

Following the dismantling of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) in early 2025, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with government officials in Lilongwe and NGO staff in Malawi's southern districts to examine how aid cuts reshape disaster governance. The analysis demonstrates that reducing donor resources strains not only collaboration between state and non-state actors but also state-citizen relationships, as promises go unfulfilled and blame falls on local actors regardless of where decisions originate. While the aid sector now focuses on advocacy and alternative donors, the article argues that meaningful localization requires shifting decision-making power, not just resources, to local actors such as government officials. Only then can the aid sector take responsibility for how it has shaped disaster governance in Malawi.

This article explores how community-engaged programme planning offers ethnographic insight. Co-written by an ethnomusicologist and a Cabo Verdean community leader, its conversational form aligns with the multivocal nature of collaboration. The piece describes university-community collaboration leading to ‘Kriolu voices sounding’ (January-February 2024), a series of public-facing panels and workshops aimed at amplifying Cabo Verdean music and activism in Rhode Island. Through reflexive storytelling, the authors show how the Cabo Verdean practice of djunta mon (joining hands; mutual help) infused their partnership. Drawing on collaborative anthropology advocating ‘epistemic partnership’, they propose the term ‘dialogic disruptions’ to describe the tensions inherent in community-facing coalitional work. Through a frank discussion of the disruptions encountered, the article offers a concrete example of public-facing solidarity work that attempts to reckon with and learn from difference, opening towards more nuanced understandings of ‘community’.

This editorial examines the divergence between American and Chinese artificial intelligence development from an anthropological perspective. It argues that American AI remains trapped in first-order Cybernetics, treating intelligence as data processing, while Chinese systems such as DeepSeek have moved closer to the second-order Cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster, which conceived intelligence as generative and meaning-creating. Drawing on ethnographic analysis of Sinhalese exorcism rituals, the editorial demonstrates the autopoietic character of human intelligence: its emergence through embodied, participatory self-production. AI systems are allopoietic, producing outputs but not themselves, and this ontological divide cannot be crossed. However, through conversational architectures that couple machine processing to human participation, it can be bridged. Anthropology, present at the founding of cybernetics, offers essential resources for understanding what is at stake as humanity approaches a threshold in its technological self-invention.

Why does mould persist in low-income housing despite decades of public health research, building science advances and advocacy efforts? This article applies a policy ecology approach to examine the dispersed regulatory landscape governing household mould in New Orleans, Louisiana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2020, the analysis traces how building codes, remediation industries and tenancy law interact to reproduce unhealthy housing conditions. In hot, humid, flood-prone southeast Louisiana, mould thrives where housing quality regulation remains weak and tenant protections limited. The article demonstrates that addressing household mould requires more than technical fixes: effective intervention depends on strengthening renters’ rights, since requests for repairs frequently trigger retaliatory eviction. Recent healthy homes legislation offers promise, but without robust tenant protections, mould cultures remain eviction cultures.