American Ethnologist最新文献

In August 2025, the editors of American Ethnologist interviewed anthropologists Khiara M. Bridges and Angel M. Foster about reproductive justice, activism, and scholarship in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which eliminated the federally protected right to abortion in the United States. Bridges and Foster both have forthcoming books that discuss reproductive rights and justice from different angles: Foster's book on mifepristone considers the terrain of access to abortion technology around the world, while Bridges's book examines the efforts of Black women to stay alive during pregnancy in the context of racial disparities in maternal mortality in the US. The interview ranged beyond abortion and maternity, covering the relationship between science and politics; the intersection of race, gender, and health; tactics for overcoming feelings of despair over the entrenchment of suffering in American ideologies of state and citizenship; and the implications of reframing health care as a person-centered enterprise.

Ottoman objects, art traditions, and social practices have long stood at the center of Turkish politics, given that the republic instituted itself through selectively destroying Ottoman institutions. By contrast, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) promotes a counterpolitics of service to Islam, positioning itself as the sole political force committed to upholding the legacy of Ottoman civilization. Yet not all Muslims are convinced by the party's neo-Ottomanism. Drawing on the work of Graham Harman, we examine how many practitioners of “traditional” arts bestow their own alternative meanings on Ottoman objects. Intuiting the objects’ concealed depths, they take an interest in Ottoman-Islamic arts and places, nourished by their pleasures and existential meanings. Such personal and unofficial orientations toward the post-Ottoman city and its objects should be interpreted as contemporary practices of alternative citizenship, enabling non-AKP ways of living a Muslim life.

The 2014–16 Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone was followed by a massive humanitarian epidemic response, which I, as a health care NGO worker in the country, witnessed materialize. Like previous international humanitarian efforts in the country, the juggernaut of humanitarian resources, personnel, military assets, and organizations was at times experienced by Sierra Leoneans as spectacle, devoid of substantive care. The epidemic and the response to it had become enfolded into what Mbembe calls the “aesthetics and stylistics” of political power in the postcolony. The logic of this political spectacle can be traced through three ethnographic scenes from the epidemic, which I gloss as “rumor,” “violence,” and “militarization.” Stories told by Ebola survivors from one village reveal the ongoing demands of sociality and care that unfolded “beneath” the spectacle, helping us consider the broader relationships among political authority, spectacle, and vulnerability in moments of humanitarian crisis and contingency.

For years the decrepit Hotel Lunik in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city founded in 1950 as a model of socialist urbanism, has been widely understood as “a trace of capitalism.” Once a central landmark, Lunik was sold to a real estate speculator in 2006 and left to decay. In contrast, however, the hotel's surrounding residential buildings have been revitalized through municipal projects that draw on socialist-era ideals. Lunik thus embodies tensions between the financialization of urban space and efforts to preserve communitarian values. Its prolonged abandonment reveals how land speculation can obstruct the circulation of value; in 2023, however, the city purchased the property, representing a corrective: this will enable a space that had been suspended through inaction to become socially generative. Tracing these dynamics, I show how ruination emerges in the gaps between incommensurable property regimes and how novel urban imaginaries can take shape amid shifting sociopolitical conditions.