Anthropology Today最新文献

This article presents a personal appraisal of Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) on the centenary of his birth, examining his trajectory from childhood in inter-war Prague through British academia to his final years establishing nationalism studies at the Central European University. The analysis portrays Gellner as an inveterate contrarian. It traces his intellectual biography from philosophy at Oxford to sociology at LSE and social anthropology at Cambridge. Gellner was a consistent critic of relativism and idealism, arguing instead for a comparative social science that was materialist – but not Marxist. The article explores Gellner's ambivalent intellectual relationships with three Central European Karls – Popper, Marx, and more speculatively Polanyi. It argues that Gellner's social philosophy reflected postwar optimism about industrial society's universal benefits. This needs correction in the light of neoliberalism and democratic backsliding, as do his influential works on nationalism and his approach to Islam. By contrast, Gellner's theoretical and methodological positions, though thoroughly unfashionable even during his lifetime, retain enduring provocative value for anthropology.

That psychotherapy is colonial is a prevailing stance within and beyond psychology in India. Such a position risks aligning with essentialist binaries like ‘East/West’ espoused by Hindu nationalism. Although its practice began in the Indian subcontinent during the late colonial period, examining the history of psychotherapy suggests that it was more than merely a ‘Western’ import. Ethnographic data from participant observation and interviews at a psychotherapy training programme in Bengaluru show that the contemporary practice of psychotherapy in India similarly resists such accusations of colonization. New entrants into India's urban middle classes are enthusiastically opting for therapy. Reading their participation as a continuation of colonization would deny them agency and potentially erase their capacity to define what decolonizing means to them. Furthermore, erstwhile colonies may be internally varied through differentials of power, thus making ‘coloniality’ a condition that cannot be easily divided into clear divisions between the Global South and the Global North.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rize and Artvin, Turkey between 2021 and 2022, this article examines how Hemshin people living in Turkey respond to the sociolinguistic and environmental transformations on Hemshin lands after decades of Turkish nationalism and more recent investment projects such as hydropower plants and major roads. Through the analysis of written texts – such as news reports – and recordings of in-depth interviews, this article shows how the Hemshin people foreground their intimate connections with their lands, recruiting cultural and linguistic resources which encapsulate narratives of place and place names. In the process, past relations with the Hemshin people's environment, language and traditional practices are repurposed, recontextualized and revalued, opening new possibilities for survival. Through the mobilization of cultural and linguistic resources, Hemshin environmentalism, fosters ‘ecolinguistic vitalities’ as a form of resistance against both environmental destruction and assimilationist pressures.

The 2024 COP29 climate summit in Baku drew international attention to the Caspian Sea's ecological crisis, where delegates could observe oil rigs dotting rapidly receding waters. This article explores how artisanal fishers along Azerbaijan's Caspian shore navigate environmental degradation and marginalizing domestic policies while being excluded from climate diplomacy. Drawing on fieldwork and COP29 analysis, this article examines contradictions between Azerbaijan's international climate positioning and its treatment of local fishing communities, who face shrinking fishing grounds, restrictive quotas and limited organization possibilities under authoritarian rule. Despite frontline climate experience, these fishers had no voice in COP29, reflecting broader trends of corporate capture and small-scale producer exclusion from global environmental governance. The case shows how proximity to climate summits can paradoxically increase marginalization in non-democratic states, contributing to understanding of postsocialist food movements and climate diplomacy politics.

This article considers the rapid rise and fall of an international development project in Papua New Guinea (PNG) funded by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). USIP was tasked with identifying local peace-building initiatives to support under the Global Fragility Act 2019, a US law that sought to change how international interventions were chosen and designed. The USIP-funded project in PNG collapsed when USIP itself was dismantled by the current White House, leaving partners in PNG suddenly unemployed and without funding. These events illuminate the nature of ‘state fragility’, an increasingly popular discourse in development circles, and the ironies inherent in how this fragility concept was used to frame interventions by a state that has itself proven extremely fragile in its international commitments.

Corruption has been characterized as a disease of failed states and poor statecraft – a deviation from virtuous development that corrupts economic progress. The dominant paradigm, in which international institutions and policy-makers concur, is one of hard binaries between state and society, law and crime. This article resists binary thinking through ethnographic fieldwork in Mae Sot, a Thai-Myanmar border town. Rather than strangling development, border corruption – as varied as patronage-based bribery and ethnic extortion – has been at the heart of state-building on the periphery and a key characteristic of capital accumulation in global value chains. By immobilizing and categorizing migrant workers, corruption regimes create the flexible labour conditions necessary for border capitalism while simultaneously opening spaces for migrant negotiation and resistance. These complex dynamics reveal how corruption functions not as an exception but as a structuring norm, producing overlapping states of inclusion and exclusion that serve state control and capitalist interests while continually contested by those subjected to them.

This guest editorial argues for renewed intellectual engagement between anthropology and economics, two disciplines that became estranged during 20th-century debates over human motivation and cooperation. With anthropologists largely rejecting economic theories following the formalist-substantivist controversy, this ‘disciplinary divorce’ has impoverished anthropological analysis by limiting available theoretical tools. Contemporary anthropologists often mischaracterize economic arguments – particularly regarding barter theory – while remaining unaware of insights from heterodox economic schools that increasingly draw on anthropological methods and findings. Both disciplines share a fundamental concern with developing a general theory of value, making collaboration essential. The institution of money serves as an especially productive site for such interdisciplinary dialogue, functioning simultaneously as a social institution and technology that addresses the coordination problems inherent in complex societies. Bitcoin's emergence as the first natively digital, nonstate medium of exchange presents an unprecedented opportunity to examine how monetary institutions evolve and impact social relationships. By moving beyond disciplinary boundaries and engaging seriously with economic theory, anthropologists can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of value across human societies while advancing both fields’ shared intellectual project of explaining social organization and cultural change.

‘When ethnography becomes history’, this year's Malinowski Memorial Lecture by Chihab El Khachab, was a tour de force. It had the uncanny effect of taking many of us on a journey through our own personal histories of anthropology as history and the legacy we as ethnographers leave behind. This article examines how the author is trying to manage an archive – her own ethnographic leavings – from fieldwork among wise and acutely politicized people in the Middle East: – in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and Syria.