Anthropology Today最新文献

The article centres on the idea of care in human attempts to remove microplastics from the water with the help of jellyfish bodies, asking: who is cared for, and who bears the cost for this care? It has recently come to light that jellyfish bodies have properties that can be utilized by humans to catch microplastics. This has led to an initiative to create filters for wastewater treatment plants that will use jellyfish bodies to catch microplastics from wastewater to mitigate the effects of human pollution. However, in the process of becoming products for various human uses (filters for wastewater plants, nutrients for agriculture, and even food), the jellyfish are killed. Humans thus seek to provide care for the underwater world by removing plastics, but to do so, they are using the bodies of jellyfish themselves.

This article examines the biopolitics of care within Madagascar's live mangrove crab trade. It reveals how care operates as a governance mechanism beyond ethical or affective practice. Care in this context is both technoscientific and embodied, shaped by regulations, market demands and labour hierarchies. I argue that the care provided to crabs – whether through nursing facilities, cold-chain logistics or the attentive handling by female traders – serves to sustain life and optimize vitality for economic purposes. This tension highlights the crucial yet often overlooked political dynamics of care in sustaining the global live seafood commodity chain. By recognizing the diverse forms of care within the seafood industry, the article also uncovers the socio-economic inequalities and ecological precarity embedded in these asymmetrical care practices.

This introduction frames a special issue exploring human-ocean creature relationships through the lens of care. The authors examine how care practices for marine species manifest across different contexts—from commercial fishing and aquaculture to conservation efforts – while highlighting these relationships’ complex, often contradictory nature. Drawing on anthropology of the ocean, political ecology, and multispecies studies, the collection investigates who cares for ocean creatures, how care is practiced, and the politics that shape these interactions. The authors acknowledge the tension between exploitation and protection, profit motives and environmental concerns, noting that care for particular species often occurs at the expense of others. By centring ocean creatures as ethnographic subjects, the collection contributes to growing anthropological interest in environmental justice and multispecies relations while advocating for more holistic approaches to marine environments in the Anthropocene.

Caring for Pacific salmon – one of the most iconic creatures of the North American West Coast – is not a straightforward task but is based on diverse understandings and relationships between salmon, people and the more-than-human environment. Local small-scale interactions, in particular, shape individual motivations to care for these fish and understand how best to do this. This article emerges from a collaborative research project with the Heiltsuk Nation, whose territory is located on the Central Coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada. Through ethnographic engagement with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents and visitors of this area, this article illustrates that close interactions are at the core of why and how people care for salmon. Drawing on theoretical engagements with the concept, care is understood not as an innocent notion but as a complicated set of practices that can also involve killing salmon. These salmon-human interactions transcend unidirectional dominance, evolving into reciprocal exchanges that distribute responsibility across species boundaries.

Lobster fishers in Maine on the northeast coast of the US find themselves in an awkward form of vulnerability. While the ocean creatures that their livelihoods so heavily rely on fare reasonably well as a population, lobster fishers have come to see themselves as an endangered species. Concerned with the alleged lethal damage fishing gear does to the endangered North Atlantic right whales, environmental organizations have advocated for restrictions on the use of fishing technologies like ropes and traps in ways that could be detrimental to the state's otherwise thriving lobster fishing industry. Easily misread as a conflict between extractive capture on the one hand and multispecies care on the other, this article shows that a closer examination of the fishing practices of these communities reveals that practices of capture and practices of care intersect and overlap in often ambiguous ways.

Farming sea cucumbers for export to China is an emerging form of artisanal aquaculture on the Swahili coast in Tanzania. The government's Blue Economy development paradigm encourages this approach, promising a ‘triple win’ of increased income in fishing communities, marine conservation and economic growth. Sea cucumber farming is thus discursively framed in terms of caring for both humans and the environment. But how do such ideals of care translate into practice? What are the limitations of caring for the political ecology of the blue economy? This article investigates sea cucumber farming as a practice of care and domestication in amphibious Swahili ocean worlds. It argues that contrary to the rhetoric of the Blue Economy, farming sea cucumbers has yet to improve local livelihoods, while it risks the very lives of these ocean creatures. The article shows the importance of paying closer attention to human engagements with various ocean creatures to appreciate the economic and ecological impact of human-ocean relationships in the global context of blue capitalism.

Restoration is gaining prominence as an approach to protect and rehabilitate marine ecologies in the Global North. It represents a shift from hands-off conservation to a more hands-on intervention to bring back species and habitats that are assumed to be degraded or lost. Understanding restoration as a practice of care illuminates the politics involved in how categorizations shape decisions about which forms of nature deserve rehabilitation. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2022, the authors explore these politics through examining oyster restoration in southeast England and the Netherlands. They show how efforts to restore the ‘native’ European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) in the North Sea starkly contrast with the categorization of Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) as unwanted ‘aliens’. Drawing from science and technology studies, they argue that such native/alien categorizations are not merely representational but performative, actively shaping the realities they purport to describe. They trace how the native-alien distinction developed historically and became tied to oyster restoration work across Europe's North Sea. Their analysis uncovers the values buried within decisions regarding which creatures belong in marine restoration and which do not. It shows how these categories determine which relationships between humans and marine creatures get included in restoration work.

This guest editorial examines how anthropologists approach the study of cryptocurrency communities, revealing a tendency to treat ‘crypto people’ as unworthy subjects deserving only critique rather than serious ethnographic enquiry. Drawing on fieldwork experiences within crypto communities, the author challenges the discipline's selective application of ethical principles and questions why certain groups are deemed less deserving of anthropological understanding. The article argues that anthropology's political homogeneity and growing reluctance to engage with challenging subjects threatens the discipline's cosmopolitan ideals. It calls for a more inclusive approach to fieldwork and subject selection – one that welcomes dissenting voices and extends anthropological curiosity to all people, including those the discipline might find politically or ideologically unpalatable.