Anthropology Today最新文献

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.

Serving alcohol is haram (forbidden) in Islam, yet most Bangladeshi-owned curry restaurants on Brick Lane hold alcohol licences. This article examines how hospitality entrepreneurs navigate this apparent contradiction through what it terms ‘pragmatic piety’, meaning flexible accommodations that balance Islamic principles, commercial imperatives and izzat (honour). Drawing on ethnographic research from the Brick Lane-Banglatown project (2018-2024), it traces a pronounced north-south spatial divide in the area's drinking cultures and contrasting business models, from licensed restaurants that foreground food to alcohol-free cafés. Life-course shifts, including post-Hajj observance, often intensify personal piety without ending alcohol sales, especially in partnerships where responsibility can be diffused. These negotiations unfold amid gentrification pressures and evolving consumption patterns that increasingly threaten the curry economy itself.

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.

Anthropologist Paul Basu and filmmaker Christopher Thomas Allen discuss their collaborative documentary Ichi: Marks in time (2023), which documents the return of colonial-era photographs to the Umudioka community in Neni, Nigeria. The film follows community responses to images from 1911 of facial scarification marks (ichi) taken by British anthropologist Northcote Thomas. Basu and Allen reflect on community-initiated collaboration, the theory of affordances applied to colonial collections, and how archival repatriation can generate joy and creativity. Through extensive image captions featuring film participants’ voices, the piece demonstrates how bringing colonial archives back into visibility activates their decolonial affordances for descendant communities.

Mould is a generic term for over 100,000 species of multicellular, filamentous fungi. In contrast to recent scholarship celebrating symbiotic human-fungal relationships, this article examines how moulds expose the darker materialities of multispecies entanglement. Tracing contemporary concerns with mould in UK housing –- from the death of toddler Awaab Ishak to the emergence of specialist remediation markets – alongside the history of penicillin's discovery in London laboratories, the article shows how moulds reveal structures of inequality, austerity politics and ‘metabolic politics’: governmental attempts to manage and monetize the transformative capacities of nonhuman life. As climate change creates new conditions for mould species to thrive, these indoor fungi offer a critical entry point for rethinking anthropological approaches to human and nonhuman entanglements in a rapidly warming world.

The Costa Rican Chinatown inaugurated in 2012 as a project of the San José mayor, is generally agreed to have been a failure, neither able to maintain Chinese businesses nor to draw new local consumers or foreign tourists. Since 2021, however, the district has rebounded in ways that accentuate changing Chinese cultural politics. Through the notion of re-sinification, this article highlights both the growing ownership of the district by local and migrant Chinese entrepreneurs and the replacement of traditional Orientalist cultural forms by more cosmopolitan expressions of pan-Asian culture and Chinese nationalism. The district's evolution illustrates how local Chinese community members negotiate multiple Chinas in Central America and highlights their relationship to an ascendant Global China, changing both the meaning and value of Chineseness as a site of urban development.

Drawing on scholarship and online testimonies, this article construes the midlife crisis as a quintessentially middle-class malaise: a symptom of the middle-class principle of investment. It afflicts people who have spent most of their lives investing in resources that promise security and prosperity while forcing them to constantly reinvest. In affording them a glimpse of the futility of these investments, the midlife crisis might even be considered an anti-capitalist malaise. Yet, operating within structures over which individuals have little control, the responses that the midlife crisis elicits affirm the same capitalist dynamics that brought it about. The analysis reveals how individual responses to this crisis − quiescence, redirected investment and divestment − ultimately reinforce rather than challenge capitalist structures.