Ethics and ontology have become prominent concepts in recent anthropology, informing a variety of research endeavours. Despite their different approaches, agendas, and concerns, they share a central focus on alterity and the relationship between self and other: Who is the other? How should I relate to the other? In relating these concerns, ontological questions would appear to have logical primacy over ethical ones: after all, one must understand the other as a particular kind of being before entering into a relationship with them. But there are many situations in which we cannot be certain how to understand the other we are facing. Especially in the context of colonial or postcolonial encounters, when social and cosmological orders have become unstable, our expectations of who the other is may clash with our experience of them. This paper discusses the narrative of an Aché elder in which he reflects upon such a situation during the violent period when the nomadic Aché came into contact with Paraguayan settlers. The narrative tells the story of the death of a white logger at the narrator's hands. While morally justifying the killing with reference to deforestation and cruelties perpetrated by settlers, he also questions it, reframing it as an ethical dilemma. The dilemma stems from his loss of ontological certainty over what kind of being his victim was after looking into his face. This paper brings this dilemma into conversation with Levinas's argument that the ethical being-for-the-other has primacy over the ontological being-in-the-world, which comes to the fore in the experience of the face of the other.
{"title":"‘We all live well together now’: Ethics, ontology, and the face of the other\u0000 « Nous vivons bien ensemble maintenant » : éthique, ontologie et visage de l'autre","authors":"Jan David Hauck","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14311","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14311","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Ethics and ontology have become prominent concepts in recent anthropology, informing a variety of research endeavours. Despite their different approaches, agendas, and concerns, they share a central focus on alterity and the relationship between self and other: Who is the other? How should I relate to the other? In relating these concerns, ontological questions would appear to have logical primacy over ethical ones: after all, one must understand the other as a particular kind of being before entering into a relationship with them. But there are many situations in which we cannot be certain how to understand the other we are facing. Especially in the context of colonial or postcolonial encounters, when social and cosmological orders have become unstable, our expectations of who the other is may clash with our experience of them. This paper discusses the narrative of an Aché elder in which he reflects upon such a situation during the violent period when the nomadic Aché came into contact with Paraguayan settlers. The narrative tells the story of the death of a white logger at the narrator's hands. While morally justifying the killing with reference to deforestation and cruelties perpetrated by settlers, he also questions it, reframing it as an ethical dilemma. The dilemma stems from his loss of ontological certainty over what kind of being his victim was after looking into his face. This paper brings this dilemma into conversation with Levinas's argument that the ethical being-for-the-other has primacy over the ontological being-in-the-world, which comes to the fore in the experience of the face of the other.</p>","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"874-898"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.14311","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144898144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (<span>1968</span>; <span>1987</span>), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (<i>sharaks</i>) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (<span>1986</span>), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (<span>2019</span>).</p><p>Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer <span>2025</span>), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’.</p><p>‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic i
{"title":"The Kigali story, the Singapore model, and rights to the city","authors":"Michael M.J. Fischer","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14308","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14308","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (<span>1968</span>; <span>1987</span>), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (<i>sharaks</i>) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (<span>1986</span>), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (<span>2019</span>).</p><p>Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer <span>2025</span>), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’.</p><p>‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic i","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"937-949"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.14308","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144787717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shannon Lee Dawdy & Tamara Kneese (eds). The new death: mortality and death care in the twenty-first century. 352 pp., bibliogr. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Studies, 2022. $39.95 (paper)","authors":"Douglas J. Davies","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14299","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"955-956"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144748190","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}
What happens when Indigenous language‐translation becomes intertwined with state politics? In contrast to scholarship's emphasis on translation as reproducing a source text in another language, in Ecuador the translation of an education law to Kichwa prioritized other forms of intertextuality that connected the resulting text to a small corpus of pre‐existing Kichwa‐language state documents. Some translators supported cohesion, arguing for uniformity in how Kichwa is written across texts. Other translators sought to emphasize readability, which meant breaking with conventions, but their efforts faltered. Language standardization shapes and is shaped by how emergent texts relate to previous ones, and these relationships are key for how Indigenous languages are used to make a state intercultural. Hegemonic and counterhegemonic views of intertextuality factor heavily into translating state texts to Kichwa and may exacerbate rifts among planners and readers by foregrounding a singular stable way of writing that differs from how people use Kichwa daily. Such efforts may work against the collective mobilization so important to Indigenous social movements.
{"title":"Translating laws to Kichwa when even textbooks are hard to read: intertextuality, language standardization, and state power in Ecuador","authors":"Nicholas Limerick","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14309","url":null,"abstract":"What happens when Indigenous language‐translation becomes intertwined with state politics? In contrast to scholarship's emphasis on translation as reproducing a source text in another language, in Ecuador the translation of an education law to Kichwa prioritized other forms of intertextuality that connected the resulting text to a small corpus of pre‐existing Kichwa‐language state documents. Some translators supported cohesion, arguing for uniformity in how Kichwa is written across texts. Other translators sought to emphasize readability, which meant breaking with conventions, but their efforts faltered. Language standardization shapes and is shaped by how emergent texts relate to previous ones, and these relationships are key for how Indigenous languages are used to make a state intercultural. Hegemonic and counterhegemonic views of intertextuality factor heavily into translating state texts to Kichwa and may exacerbate rifts among planners and readers by foregrounding a singular stable way of writing that differs from how people use Kichwa daily. Such efforts may work against the collective mobilization so important to Indigenous social movements.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144701481","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 paper introduces the emic concept of guesting, coined by women living in refugee accommodation to distinguish their form of hospitality from other more hierarchical forms of hosting. Central to guesting is the unspoken rule that once you have played the host, next time you must be the guest. The reciprocal nature of guesting allows for the continual exchange of gifts and support between the women, creating a strong social network, which acts as a foundation to their homemaking practices. Additionally, guesting acts as a key site for collective remembering, creating a context in which the women can connect to pre‐migratory aesthetics and sensuous evocations. However, the rules and regulations set out by the state‐run refugee accommodation impose limitations on the ways the women in the group are able to use guesting as a homemaking practice. In particular, the guest curfew and the inability to change certain aesthetic features within the rooms remind them of their lack of agency within the accommodation.
{"title":"Guesting: rethinking the relationship between hospitality and homemaking within temporary refugee accommodation","authors":"Charlot Schneider","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14291","url":null,"abstract":"This paper introduces the emic concept of guesting, coined by women living in refugee accommodation to distinguish their form of hospitality from other more hierarchical forms of hosting. Central to guesting is the unspoken rule that once you have played the host, next time you must be the guest. The reciprocal nature of guesting allows for the continual exchange of gifts and support between the women, creating a strong social network, which acts as a foundation to their homemaking practices. Additionally, guesting acts as a key site for collective remembering, creating a context in which the women can connect to pre‐migratory aesthetics and sensuous evocations. However, the rules and regulations set out by the state‐run refugee accommodation impose limitations on the ways the women in the group are able to use guesting as a homemaking practice. In particular, the guest curfew and the inability to change certain aesthetic features within the rooms remind them of their lack of agency within the accommodation.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144701480","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":"Zee, Jerry C. Continent in dust: experiments in a Chinese weather system. 312 pp., bibliogr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. £25.00 (paper)","authors":"Andrea E. Pia","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14295","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14295","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"951-952"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144920598","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":"Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff (ed.). Performing craft in Mexico: artisans, aesthetics, and the power of translation. 330 pp., maps, figs, bibliogr. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. £90.00 (hardcover)","authors":"Frances Paola Garnica Quiñones","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14297","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14297","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"952-953"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144920599","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}
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a hospital in Greater Manchester, England in 2016–17, we describe how a set of national health priorities were translated into work for hospital managers and clinicians during a period of significant organizational pressure. Departing from the focus on practice and posthuman relations in many recent ethnographies of healthcare, we attend to inequalities between perspectives on organizational change, exploring the hidden work involved in producing improvements to care quality in a public general hospital. Putting practice in perspective, we shed light on relations between the emergent politics of bureaucracy and more contentious politics of healthcare. Reflecting on connections between the posthuman turn and rationales of management, we emphasize the need to view social science theory in its broader social context, and examine practices of work, care and management from bottom‐up points of view.
{"title":"From the manager's point of view: work intensification, posthuman ethnography, and healthcare in England","authors":"Adam Brisley, Simon Bailey, Thomas Blakeman","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14294","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a hospital in Greater Manchester, England in 2016–17, we describe how a set of national health priorities were translated into work for hospital managers and clinicians during a period of significant organizational pressure. Departing from the focus on practice and posthuman relations in many recent ethnographies of healthcare, we attend to inequalities between perspectives on organizational change, exploring the hidden work involved in producing improvements to care quality in a public general hospital. Putting practice in perspective, we shed light on relations between the emergent politics of bureaucracy and more contentious politics of healthcare. Reflecting on connections between the posthuman turn and rationales of management, we emphasize the need to view social science theory in its broader social context, and examine practices of work, care and management from bottom‐up points of view.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144701479","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":"Paerregaard, Karsten. Andean meltdown: a climate ethnography of water, power, and culture in Peru. 210 pp., 19 illus., bibliogr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. £25.00 (paper)","authors":"Chakad Ojani","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14296","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14296","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"950-960"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144920586","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":"Munhoz, Sara Regina. A paixão do acesso: uma etnografia das ferramentas digitais e da jurisprudência do Superior Tribunal de Justiça. 366 pp., bibliogr. São Paulo: Hucitec Editora, 2024. R$79.00 (paper)","authors":"João Gilberto Belvel Fernandes Júnior","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.14302","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.14302","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 3","pages":"958-959"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144920589","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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