Anthropology Today最新文献

This article examines informal waste management at Mbeubeuss, Dakar's largest landfill site. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2016 with waste pickers known as boudioumane, the analysis reveals how discarded plastics traverse circuits of extraction and exchange, transitioning from worthless to valuable through everyday acts of sorting and selling. The article situates the Mbeubeuss case within discard studies, emphasizing how the circulation and material specificity of plastics shape both livelihoods and urban ecologies in contemporary Senegal. Focusing on the work trajectory of one waste picker, Badara Ngom, the article demonstrates how waste creates economic relations, spaces and alternative value systems. The conclusion addresses recent World Bank-funded modernization efforts that threaten to erase Mbeubeuss and rewrite the fate of both waste and informal workers.

This guest editorial examines the transformation of American concepts of freedom in the context of recent geopolitical tensions between the United States and Denmark over Greenland. Drawing on Erich Fromm's The fear of freedom, the analysis traces how contemporary Republican rhetoric has inverted traditional notions of freedom from oppression into freedom from democratic constraints. The editorial argues that MAGA movement discourse reveals a shift where freedom increasingly means liberation from the responsibilities and limitations that democratic societies place on destructive impulses. Through examination of political statements and cultural patterns, it demonstrates how authoritarian movements offer refuge from the anxieties of modern democratic life by reframing freedom as the absence of restraint rather than protection from domination. The analysis suggests that defending democratic values requires addressing the economic precarity and social isolation that make authoritarian appeals attractive.

This guest editorial examines the emergence of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as a secret police force in the United States, drawing parallels to authoritarian regimes of the past. Through a personal narrative about explaining ICE raids to young children in Oakland, it analyzes how AI-powered surveillance technologies developed by venture capital-funded startups enable mass deportation operations. Companies such as Clearview AI, Palantir Technologies and Flock Safety provide facial recognition, data integration and licence plate tracking tools that facilitate pre-emptive repression. The editorial traces connections between Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, and neo-reactionary ideologies that reject democratic governance. It concludes by asking what roles anthropologists might play in response to the erosion of democracy, ranging from advocacy and civil disobedience to more drastic forms of resistance.

This guest editorial examines how anthropologists should respond to contemporary crises, from Trump's attacks on academic institutions to global authoritarianism. While protest has long characterized anthropological practice, activism alone is insufficient. Drawing on critiques of empathy's inherent biases, its favouring of ingroups and susceptibility to manipulation, this editorial proposes a deeper form of empathy aligned with Liu and Shange's ‘thick solidarity’. This framework requires three acts: identifying with human suffering; understanding injustice from all perspectives, including those we oppose; and extending compassion to ourselves as researchers. Evidence that 88 per cent of anthropologists experience vicarious trauma with minimal institutional support underscores this final act's importance. The approach advocated for here requires maintaining both ethical commitment and methodological rigour in navigating political polarization.

This article examines how same-sex parent families in Italy navigate a legal framework that denies them formal recognition, acknowledging only biological parents while leaving social parents without legal protections. The article analyzes two key interventions by the Meloni government: first, the directive to cease recognizing children of same-sex couples and the retroactive challenge to existing birth certificates; and second, the introduction of Bill C. 887 (the ‘Varchi law’), which criminalizes surrogacy as a ‘universal crime’ even when performed legally abroad. Through ethnographic analysis, the article demonstrates how these political actions deliberately undermine the transparency and visibility strategies that Italian same-sex families have developed to document their parental roles and seek social and legal recognition. These families’ practices of meticulous documentation and public visibility constitute daily acts of resistance against state discrimination, yet face increasing pressure from a government agenda that reasserts heterosexual nuclear family primacy.