{"title":"Sandstrom, Alan & Pamela EffreinSandstrom. Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua sacred journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana. 478 pp., bibliogr. Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2023. $34.95 (paper)","authors":"Alanna Cant","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70054","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145961801","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 interrogates the role of testimonial disclosure as a mechanism of access and a barrier to visibility for marginal people, particularly adolescents, in the UK. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024 in alternative educational provision (AP), as well as in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, with framing examples from third‐sector welfare support spaces, the article examines how disclosures are demanded but are consistently ill‐attended. The article explores how systemic disbelief, diagnostic delay, and educational enclosure may be seen to be the result of mismatched communication affordances, which ultimately foreclose pathways to support and progression for these interlocutors. I draw on multimodal ethnographic methods co‐produced with young people as part of a programme I devised called Anthropology By Children/Communities, or ABC, to foreground the ways that non‐normative ways of being may lead to testimonial disclosures failing to be acknowledged because of the problem of divergent affordances, leading to epistemic injustice and educational enclosure. The article advances the concept of ‘poverty of pathway’ to challenge dominant tropes of ‘poverty of aspiration’, showing that young people aspire and even attempt to advocate, but are frequently misunderstood, made structurally illegible and denied progression towards aimed‐for futures.
{"title":"Disclosure, disbelief, enclosure: listening with precarious kids in London","authors":"Kelly Fagan Robinson","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70032","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates the role of testimonial disclosure as a mechanism of access and a barrier to visibility for marginal people, particularly adolescents, in the UK. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024 in alternative educational provision (AP), as well as in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, with framing examples from third‐sector welfare support spaces, the article examines how disclosures are demanded but are consistently ill‐attended. The article explores how systemic disbelief, diagnostic delay, and educational enclosure may be seen to be the result of mismatched communication affordances, which ultimately foreclose pathways to support and progression for these interlocutors. I draw on multimodal ethnographic methods co‐produced with young people as part of a programme I devised called Anthropology By Children/Communities, or ABC, to foreground the ways that non‐normative ways of being may lead to testimonial disclosures failing to be acknowledged because of the problem of divergent affordances, leading to epistemic injustice and educational enclosure. The article advances the concept of ‘poverty of pathway’ to challenge dominant tropes of ‘poverty of aspiration’, showing that young people aspire and even attempt to advocate, but are frequently misunderstood, made structurally illegible and denied progression towards aimed‐for futures.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"400 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145950022","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":"Elders and ancestors: on the ethics of intergenerational care","authors":"Benjamin Jacobs Airing","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145950003","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}
In Gasi, a Kenyan coastal village, fish gifting has shifted from an expression of generosity to a morally charged response to requests for rightful shares. As fish stocks decline due to habitat degradation and overfishing, gifting practices have morphed into pressured transactions, shaping an emerging ‘forced gift’ economy. Once grounded in reciprocity and religious devotion, gifting now reveals mounting tensions between villagers, who see themselves as morally entitled to fish, and fishers – both local and migrant – who struggle to meet escalating demands. For villagers, fish gifts are critical for sustenance and a symbolic shield against economic hardship. Yet scarcity has deepened anxieties and ambivalence within these exchanges. Fishers, caught between survival and social obligation, navigate complex expectations that reshape communal roles and strain social bonds. Pressure is sharpened by constant moral scrutiny, compelling fishers to give not from goodwill, but fear – of divine displeasure, gossip, shame, curses, violence, or accusations of witchcraft. Through an ethnographic lens, this article engages classic and contemporary theories of gifting and taking to examine how demands for fish gifts – whether fulfilled generously or under duress – reflect and intensify social rifts, illuminating the resilience and fragility within Gasi's evolving moral economy.
{"title":"Forced gifts and moral claims: entitlement, fear, and the moral economy of fish in coastal Kenya","authors":"Victor Mwakha Alati","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70020","url":null,"abstract":"In Gasi, a Kenyan coastal village, fish gifting has shifted from an expression of generosity to a morally charged response to requests for rightful shares. As fish stocks decline due to habitat degradation and overfishing, gifting practices have morphed into pressured transactions, shaping an emerging ‘forced gift’ economy. Once grounded in reciprocity and religious devotion, gifting now reveals mounting tensions between villagers, who see themselves as morally entitled to fish, and fishers – both local and migrant – who struggle to meet escalating demands. For villagers, fish gifts are critical for sustenance and a symbolic shield against economic hardship. Yet scarcity has deepened anxieties and ambivalence within these exchanges. Fishers, caught between survival and social obligation, navigate complex expectations that reshape communal roles and strain social bonds. Pressure is sharpened by constant moral scrutiny, compelling fishers to give not from goodwill, but fear – of divine displeasure, gossip, shame, curses, violence, or accusations of witchcraft. Through an ethnographic lens, this article engages classic and contemporary theories of gifting and taking to examine how demands for fish gifts – whether fulfilled generously or under duress – reflect and intensify social rifts, illuminating the resilience and fragility within Gasi's evolving moral economy.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145950006","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":"Editor's statement","authors":"Dimitrios Theodossopoulos","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145893903","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}
Adolescence is widely recognized as a key life stage, yet its meaning and experience remain under‐explored due to the complex interplay between biological and social transformations. While researchers across fields such as psychology and public health increasingly frame adolescence as a ‘critical period’, anthropology offers distinctive insights that challenge simplistic and reductionist accounts. This special issue introduces the Anthropology of Adolescence, situating the discipline as an important contributor to the emerging interdisciplinary interest in adolescence. Drawing on a century of anthropological engagement, we emphasize adolescence not simply as a passage between childhood and adulthood, but as a dynamic biocultural stage through which broader social, political, and ecological processes can be understood. The contributions presented here span different forms of anthropology, employing varied methods from structured interviews and focus groups to multimodal ethnographic research. Together, they demonstrate the breadth of anthropological research, foregrounding themes such as spatiality, intersectionality, and socialization. In doing so, this issue illustrates why anthropology and adolescence go together, and how the discipline can enrich wider debates on this vital life stage.
{"title":"Introducing the Anthropology of Adolescence","authors":"Emily H. Emmott, Benjamin Theobald, Mark Dyble","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70031","url":null,"abstract":"Adolescence is widely recognized as a key life stage, yet its meaning and experience remain under‐explored due to the complex interplay between biological and social transformations. While researchers across fields such as psychology and public health increasingly frame adolescence as a ‘critical period’, anthropology offers distinctive insights that challenge simplistic and reductionist accounts. This special issue introduces the Anthropology of Adolescence, situating the discipline as an important contributor to the emerging interdisciplinary interest in adolescence. Drawing on a century of anthropological engagement, we emphasize adolescence not simply as a passage between childhood and adulthood, but as a dynamic biocultural stage through which broader social, political, and ecological processes can be understood. The contributions presented here span different forms of anthropology, employing varied methods from structured interviews and focus groups to multimodal ethnographic research. Together, they demonstrate the breadth of anthropological research, foregrounding themes such as spatiality, intersectionality, and socialization. In doing so, this issue illustrates why anthropology and adolescence go together, and how the discipline can enrich wider debates on this vital life stage.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145895634","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}
There has been long debate about what constitutes modern behaviour with much of the focus on Africa and the emergence of Homo sapiens . But there has also been recognition by many researchers that the route to modern behaviour can be traced back into the Middle Pleistocene and that a multi‐regional approach addresses the question more broadly by contributing evidence from other hominin species. This article re‐evaluates some of the evidence from Europe over the last half million years, drawing on developments in technology, economizing behaviours, landscape use, social organization, and social signalling through material culture.
{"title":"Behavioural complexity, cultural mosaics, and the routeways to modern behaviour from a Middle Pleistocene European perspective","authors":"Nick Ashton, Rob Davis","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70027","url":null,"abstract":"There has been long debate about what constitutes modern behaviour with much of the focus on Africa and the emergence of <jats:italic>Homo sapiens</jats:italic> . But there has also been recognition by many researchers that the route to modern behaviour can be traced back into the Middle Pleistocene and that a multi‐regional approach addresses the question more broadly by contributing evidence from other hominin species. This article re‐evaluates some of the evidence from Europe over the last half million years, drawing on developments in technology, economizing behaviours, landscape use, social organization, and social signalling through material culture.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"111 3S 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145893910","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}
The contested dynamics of slum gentrification in Rio de Janeiro came into focus during the brief period of relative peace brought by the pacification policy leading up to the 2016 Olympics. In this unprecedented moment, Rio's South Zone favela residents experienced a respite from the daily confrontations with police operations and drug trade violence. This article examines a neighbourly dispute over an ocean view in Vidigal – a favela in one of Rio's wealthiest areas – to explore the interplay between what I call Rio's racialized moral geography and Vidigal's moral economy of melhorar de vida (to improve one's lot in life). While Rio's moral geography, shaped by a legacy of racialized governance of precarization, sustained patterns of inequality, Vidigalenses mobilized fluid and pragmatic values of self‐improvement and belonging to resist and reappropriate gentrification. By framing gentrification as an extension of historical dynamics of exclusion and a lived process, this analysis advances conventional studies that emphasize capital accumulation, displacement, and state‐led urban renewal. It shows how ethnographic attention illuminates the ways structural forces and racialized histories are reworked through everyday reinterpretations of urban change, as people navigate both opportunities and risks in their struggle to assert the right to prosper.
在2016年奥运会前的和平政策带来的相对和平的短暂时期内，里约热内卢贫民窟士绅化的争议动态成为焦点。在这个前所未有的时刻，里约热内卢南区的贫民窟居民从每天与警察行动和毒品交易暴力的对抗中得到了喘息。这篇文章考察了在里约热内卢最富有地区之一的贫民窟维迪加（Vidigal）发生的一场关于海景的邻里纠纷，以探索我所说的里约热内卢的种族化道德地理和维迪加（melhorar de vida）的道德经济（改善生活中的命运）之间的相互作用。b里约热内卢的道德地理是由不稳定的种族化治理遗留下来的，持续的不平等模式，Vidigalenses动员了自我完善和归属感的流动和实用主义价值观，以抵抗和重新适应士绅化。通过将中产阶级化视为排斥的历史动态和生活过程的延伸，该分析推进了强调资本积累、流离失所和国家主导的城市更新的传统研究。它展示了民族志的关注如何通过对城市变化的日常重新解释，阐明了结构性力量和种族化历史是如何被重新设计的，因为人们在维护繁荣权利的斗争中既要把握机遇，也要把握风险。
{"title":"Views of Vidigal: negotiating opportunities and risks in a gentrifying favela in Rio de Janeiro","authors":"Angela Torresan","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70024","url":null,"abstract":"The contested dynamics of slum gentrification in Rio de Janeiro came into focus during the brief period of relative peace brought by the pacification policy leading up to the 2016 Olympics. In this unprecedented moment, Rio's South Zone favela residents experienced a respite from the daily confrontations with police operations and drug trade violence. This article examines a neighbourly dispute over an ocean view in Vidigal – a favela in one of Rio's wealthiest areas – to explore the interplay between what I call Rio's racialized moral geography and Vidigal's moral economy of <jats:italic>melhorar de vida</jats:italic> (to improve one's lot in life). While Rio's moral geography, shaped by a legacy of racialized governance of precarization, sustained patterns of inequality, Vidigalenses mobilized fluid and pragmatic values of self‐improvement and belonging to resist and reappropriate gentrification. By framing gentrification as an extension of historical dynamics of exclusion and a lived process, this analysis advances conventional studies that emphasize capital accumulation, displacement, and state‐led urban renewal. It shows how ethnographic attention illuminates the ways structural forces and racialized histories are reworked through everyday reinterpretations of urban change, as people navigate both opportunities and risks in their struggle to assert the right to prosper.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829982","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}
Anthropologists, in common with social theorists more generally, have often understood social life as an emergent phenomenon grounded in practices of creativity and improvisation. Where stasis and continuity feature, these are often presented as illusory manifestations of underlying processes of ‘invention’, or as external impositions upon otherwise creative and innovative actors. These approaches have helped to challenge the essentialisms that underlie the seeming self‐evidence of ideas such as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. They foreground the hidden work that is needed to make things endure and the political stakes of presenting things as if they had always been that way. While building on this work, we argue that the tendency to see social practice as a fundamentally emergent and creative process has resulted in theoretical inattention to forms of action that are aimed at the achievement of stasis and continuity. Relatedly, we suggest that framing such actions as invention or creativity can fail to capture what is ethnographically at stake in practices oriented to the celebration of the pre‐existent and towards the preservation of what is already in place. While highlighting the paradoxically invisible work required to sustain what ‘already exists’, we seek to draw out a range of social practices characterized by the linked logics of non‐inventive agency and thoughtful inaction.
{"title":"On the problem of continuity: a theory of culture beyond invention","authors":"Paolo Heywood, Thomas Yarrow","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70023","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists, in common with social theorists more generally, have often understood social life as an emergent phenomenon grounded in practices of creativity and improvisation. Where stasis and continuity feature, these are often presented as illusory manifestations of underlying processes of ‘invention’, or as external impositions upon otherwise creative and innovative actors. These approaches have helped to challenge the essentialisms that underlie the seeming self‐evidence of ideas such as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. They foreground the hidden work that is needed to make things endure and the political stakes of presenting things as if they had always been that way. While building on this work, we argue that the tendency to see social practice as a fundamentally emergent and creative process has resulted in theoretical inattention to forms of action that are aimed at the achievement of stasis and continuity. Relatedly, we suggest that framing such actions as invention or creativity can fail to capture what is ethnographically at stake in practices oriented to the celebration of the pre‐existent and towards the preservation of what is already in place. While highlighting the paradoxically invisible work required to sustain what ‘already exists’, we seek to draw out a range of social practices characterized by the linked logics of non‐inventive agency and thoughtful inaction.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829983","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}
Belizean men in sporadic employment need to hustle to make ends meet. The term ‘catch and kill’ describes this casual engagement in wage labour and the need to undertake wageless activities to make a living in this Caribbean nation in Central America. In the rural context, its use signifies relative autonomy from a wage, while in the urban context it denotes a condition characterized by the scarcity of wage work. Focusing on how Afro‐descendant men in Belize City navigate between casual and flexible employment in the construction industry and street hustling, the article explores the interplay between wage labour and wagelessness in their everyday lives, and the ways in which they understand it. Catch and kill as an idiom of precarity allows them to identify with a life condition defined by occupational multiplicity rather than a single occupation, and to make sense of the multiple moral attributes – including those linked to their gendered reproductive responsibilities – associated with their livelihoods. Taken seriously, such local categories provide a key to contemporary anthropological concerns, deepening understandings of precarity and expanding its analytical purchase.
{"title":"‘Catch and kill’: work, hustle, and precarious life in urban Belize","authors":"Giuseppe Troccoli","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70021","url":null,"abstract":"Belizean men in sporadic employment need to hustle to make ends meet. The term ‘catch and kill’ describes this casual engagement in wage labour and the need to undertake wageless activities to make a living in this Caribbean nation in Central America. In the rural context, its use signifies relative autonomy from a wage, while in the urban context it denotes a condition characterized by the scarcity of wage work. Focusing on how Afro‐descendant men in Belize City navigate between casual and flexible employment in the construction industry and street hustling, the article explores the interplay between wage labour and wagelessness in their everyday lives, and the ways in which they understand it. Catch and kill as an <jats:italic>idiom of precarity</jats:italic> allows them to identify with a life condition defined by occupational multiplicity rather than a single occupation, and to make sense of the multiple moral attributes – including those linked to their gendered reproductive responsibilities – associated with their livelihoods. Taken seriously, such local categories provide a key to contemporary anthropological concerns, deepening understandings of precarity and expanding its analytical purchase.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829984","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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