{"title":"A statement from the incoming editor","authors":"Dimitrios Theodossopoulos","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14259","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 1","pages":"5-6"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article offers ‘stages’, an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi‐level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing ‘stages’ as a concept/pun – in the spatial and temporal sense – I show how economic performances must be ‘staged’ to convince people to invest. ‘Staging’ economic performances leads to creating a physical space of heightened excitement, expertise, and a temporal period that is experienced as urgent where one must think in an innovative way to bring about a profitable future. Under these conditions, ‘stages’ reveals how the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate project becomes indistinguishable to those on the ground. Doing your ‘due diligence’ to discern between the two is anything but straightforward. Despite claims by Euro‐American financial elites that startups and MLMs are polar opposites, this article demonstrates their striking similarity. More broadly, ‘stages’ reveals how economic performances gain efficacy, travel beyond specific sites, and come to act on people.
{"title":"‘Staging’ divinatory economic performances: Comparing startup and MLM cryptocurrency projects","authors":"Yathukulan Yogarajah","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14262","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers ‘stages’, an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi‐level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing ‘stages’ as a concept/pun – in the spatial and temporal sense – I show how economic performances must be ‘staged’ to convince people to invest. ‘Staging’ economic performances leads to creating a physical space of heightened excitement, expertise, and a temporal period that is experienced as urgent where one must think in an innovative way to bring about a profitable future. Under these conditions, ‘stages’ reveals how the line between a legitimate and an illegitimate project becomes indistinguishable to those on the ground. Doing your ‘due diligence’ to discern between the two is anything but straightforward. Despite claims by Euro‐American financial elites that startups and MLMs are polar opposites, this article demonstrates their striking similarity. More broadly, ‘stages’ reveals how economic performances gain efficacy, travel beyond specific sites, and come to act on people.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"209 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143443160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herders for whom the impact area of the launch site serves to hold mining companies and other land users at bay; in a positive sense, among space enthusiasts who call for potential synergies between the two industries; and analogically, by actors who envisage extraplanetary futures vis‐à‐vis mining and the subterranean. While the grounding of outer space in earthly milieus is a recurring analytical procedure in the social sciences and humanities, these empirical‐ethnographic connections and comparisons encourage an anthropological approach that also attends to the way Earth is occasionally rendered extraterrestrial‐like.
{"title":"Mining and/in outer space: Verticality, analogy, and infrastructural mediation in subarctic Sweden","authors":"Chakad Ojani","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14261","url":null,"abstract":"Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herders for whom the impact area of the launch site serves to hold mining companies and other land users at bay; in a positive sense, among space enthusiasts who call for potential synergies between the two industries; and analogically, by actors who envisage extraplanetary futures vis‐à‐vis mining and the subterranean. While the grounding of outer space in earthly milieus is a recurring analytical procedure in the social sciences and humanities, these empirical‐ethnographic connections and comparisons encourage an anthropological approach that also attends to the way Earth is occasionally rendered extraterrestrial‐like.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143443329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article develops a more‐than‐human conception of charisma to explain the interrelated magnetism of palaeontologists and prehistoric megafauna in the United States since the nineteenth century. It extends anthropological analysis of charisma to non‐human bodies, and argues that charisma is created by more‐than‐human processes involving tactile interactions among people and matter within particular social and political‐economic contexts. This historical and ethnographic study of a few iconic dinosaur specimens, and the famed scientists who have collected, studied, and mounted them, shows how the more‐than‐human charisma of vertebrate palaeontology has been shaped by the violent masculinity that rose to prominence in conjunction with the exploration and colonization of the western United States. It further demonstrates how the virile charisma of certain scientists and fossils continues to be a powerful force that mobilizes people to dedicate enormous resources and labour to them.
{"title":"More‐than‐human charisma, iconic fossils, and palaeontologists in the United States","authors":"Elana Shever","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14263","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a more‐than‐human conception of charisma to explain the interrelated magnetism of palaeontologists and prehistoric megafauna in the United States since the nineteenth century. It extends anthropological analysis of charisma to non‐human bodies, and argues that charisma is created by more‐than‐human processes involving tactile interactions among people and matter within particular social and political‐economic contexts. This historical and ethnographic study of a few iconic dinosaur specimens, and the famed scientists who have collected, studied, and mounted them, shows how the more‐than‐human charisma of vertebrate palaeontology has been shaped by the violent masculinity that rose to prominence in conjunction with the exploration and colonization of the western United States. It further demonstrates how the virile charisma of certain scientists and fossils continues to be a powerful force that mobilizes people to dedicate enormous resources and labour to them.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143443328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture, and/or manuring. At different points in time, the balance of these strategies differed radically. We use this insight to evaluate the trajectorial affordances of different agropastoral regimes across the longue‐durée period c.1600 BCE‐1850 CE. Trajectorial affordances is our term for describing the historical directionalities held in potential and actuated by specific human‐landscape engagements. We use our model to interrogate the seemingly linear evolution of the nutrient‐concentrating systems from ‘simple’ herding practices of the Early Bronze Age to more ‘advanced’ manure‐based agriculture in the nineteenth century. Although the nineteenth‐century system was sophisticated, it centred on a gruelling manuring practice that unleashed destructive sand drifts. We argue this mode of agriculture arose with the gradual constriction of livelihood options associated with civilizational expansion. Our analysis grapples with the open‐ended nature of human‐landscape becoming and the dynamics of what Ian Hodder calls entrapment.
{"title":"Agropastoral possibilism and the trajectorial affordances of Danish inland heaths: a study of deep‐time entrapment","authors":"Zachary Caple, Mette Løvschal","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14260","url":null,"abstract":"History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture, and/or manuring. At different points in time, the balance of these strategies differed radically. We use this insight to evaluate the <jats:italic>trajectorial affordances</jats:italic> of different agropastoral regimes across the <jats:italic>longue‐durée</jats:italic> period c.1600 BCE‐1850 CE. Trajectorial affordances is our term for describing the historical directionalities held in potential and actuated by specific human‐landscape engagements. We use our model to interrogate the seemingly linear evolution of the nutrient‐concentrating systems from ‘simple’ herding practices of the Early Bronze Age to more ‘advanced’ manure‐based agriculture in the nineteenth century. Although the nineteenth‐century system was sophisticated, it centred on a gruelling manuring practice that unleashed destructive sand drifts. We argue this mode of agriculture arose with the gradual constriction of livelihood options associated with civilizational expansion. Our analysis grapples with the open‐ended nature of human‐landscape becoming and the dynamics of what Ian Hodder calls <jats:italic>entrapment</jats:italic>.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143418414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Velásquez, Teresa A. Pachamama politics: Campesino water defenders and the anti-mining movement in Andean Ecuador. 272 pp., bibliogr. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. $35.00 (paper)","authors":"Nora Haenn","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14249","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14249","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 1","pages":"329-330"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143044697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fountain, Philip. The service of faith: an ethnography of Mennonites and development. 366 pp., 7 illus., bibliogr. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University, 2024. CA$44.95 (paper)","authors":"Jonathan Benthall","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14256","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14256","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 1","pages":"324-325"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143035119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Berzon, Todd S. Classifying Christians: ethnography, heresiology, and the limits of knowledge in Late Antiquity. 316 pp., bibliogr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. £30.00 (paper)","authors":"David Spiller","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14258","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14258","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 1","pages":"321-322"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143034962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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