Cultural Anthropology最新文献

Across the planet, the circular economy has grown into a complex governance agenda. This is also the case in Cambodia, where various formal and informal circular activities have recently coalesced into new arrangements. However, much more is at stake than questions of economic governance. By tracing the circulation of diverse objects between practices guided by different worths and correspondingly variable enactments of circularity, the present travelogue exhibits circular worlds in tension. The relative significance of these worlds and worths is negotiated and tested at sites where representatives of many worlds are present. Later, some circular formats materialize in distributed practices, scale up, and gain in reality. Others linger in the shadows, obstructed by visions of the circular economy as a single integrated system. This exercise in applied metaphysics elicits circularity and its diverse potentials as patchwork effects of circulations between uncommon worlds.

In the Paraguayan Chaco, cattle evoke images of power, prosperity, and celebration, but they also trigger one of the quickest deforestation processes in the world. The presence of cattle in the region has deep historical roots, dating back to the beginning of the colonization process, when the establishment of a double economy based on cattle ranching and the tannin industry dispossessed indigenous people of their territories. Through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the Carlos Casado tannin company, I suggest considering domestication and ferality—and their local related idioms (amansar, anestesiar, sagua'a, señuelo, carne)—as inter-species categories crucial for understanding processes of colonization from a local perspective. In particular, I claim that practices and idioms related to the (un)domestication domain have been used to make sense of ethnic, class, and power relationships, as well as of practices of resistance.

In this essay, I follow predatory fleas, sterile flies, and other insects, as well as farmers, across the Arava/Arabah, an arid desert region in southern Israel/Palestine, south of the Dead Sea, marked by harsh environmental conditions. Following a four-year ethnographic study, I examine the ecological and political impacts of Zionist settlement in the area and the fluidity of definitions of alien/native species. I use the term agricultural infrastructure to describe the network of connections that make agriculture possible—wells, pipes, and “beneficial” insects—as part of a theoretical framework that integrates both the human and non-human in the Anthropocene era, while also examining the challenges posed by environmental and agricultural transformation. Agricultural infrastructure is shown in this piece as a political enterprise: it establishes hierarchical boundaries between communities and strengthens land control while maintaining and establishing boundaries between humans and non-humans, often resulting in compounding ecological harm. Yet the use of the term agricultural infrastructure within a given context of settler colonialism contributes a more nuanced approach than dichotomous contrasts between alien versus native, settler versus local.

Our generation of editors faces a shared set of critical challenges (ESTS Editorial Collective et al. 2021; Neale et al. 2022). This is no different for our collective, which in addition has an experimental distributed organizational structure. We view those challenges with both familiarity and alarm. The problematics at issue have, we know, been around for a long time. Like so many, we feel both the urgent need to do something now and anxious awareness of how little we can do—right now, at least. How to steer an informed, confident, and yet modest editorial course through challenges of earthly habitat loss, global energy crisis, Cold War revivalism, right-wing theo-political awakenings, pandemic mismanagement, white supremacism, massive urbanization, dataveillance, and platform capitalism? How can we do so while remaining attuned to this period's huge potentials: Black Lives Matter, Sanctuary and Fearless cities, Indigenous resurgence, renewed feminist internationals, atlases of parasites, modest witnesses, other-than-human diplomats, and anthropological companions?

As members of the editorial collective of Cultural Anthropology, we stand as humbled witnesses to this crucial moment. We began work wondering: What is relevant? What is called for in this historical moment of world history and in the history of academia, anthropology in particular? How can we help give form to experiences and experiments in other than a reactive mode? Such questions have guided Cultural Anthropology's signature orientation to anthropology since its foundation. Our vision for the journal builds on this trajectory to intervene in the affordances of editorship as a platform for connective transformations in anthropology and beyond.

Our approach to editorship also reflects our desire to enable a multiplicity of sensibilities, methodological practices, and scales of consideration. There are many stories that need to be told, and many stories that can no longer be told in the same way. Stories require specific kinds of arguments and styles. This goes beyond simply amplifying our intellectual and political concerns. Rather, different modes of analysis might help us better understand—and engage with—contemporary experiences and movements of justice and reparation, autonomy and solidarity. This moment demands, we think, more than analytic engagement with ongoing and radicalizing systems of extraction, displacement, violence, and subjugation—crucial as that analytic work remains. Nor can we only document intransitive worlds of affectivity, improvisation, vulnerability, and silence. The moment, as many have pointed out, demands a retooling of anthropological methods to concretely prefigure more judicious dispositions of social and collective experience. As such, we imagine editorship to include the collective design of concrete tools to further anthropology's salience to the exigencies of transformation, resu

This article examines Brazil's project of incarceration through the figure of evasion (evasão)—the act of escaping prison custody, often temporarily. Evasion traces a path across the borders of captivity and freedom, as people routinely flee confinement, only to return of their own accord. I position both prisons and evasion as part of an ongoing history of, and tension between, Black fugitive life and emancipation in Brazil and the Americas. I argue that while evasion offers no clear exit from the punitive edge of the law, it produces another mode of inhabiting the time and territory of incarceration. With a focus on two incarcerated Black travestis, I outline some of these evasive movements and demonstrate the fault lines that they reveal—both within the prison system's own claims to legitimacy and in the concepts that we bring to bear on incarceration.

This article foregrounds the returns of migration by following young migrant workers to Lebanon and back to subsistence farming communities in western Sudan during a time of revolution and economic crisis in both countries. Their labor and the returns of it connect these two seemingly distinct zones of labor and production in a transregional economy, linking East Africa to the Middle East. In this cross-border economy, the search for work through mobility has become a point of value extraction by brokers and border guards, and at the same time a practice of gendered self-validation for male migrants. In Sudan, migrants and brokers both refer to this practice as a gamble, mughamara. Proposing mughamara as an ethnographic concept of mobility, I show how young migrants use this term to validate themselves through migration. Comparing their experiences to Sudanese migrants who worked in Lebanon decades before them, I show how the youth's presentation of mobility as a necessary gamble with life reveals an underlying generational experience of crisis and the foreclosure of class mobility. In a political and socioeconomic context where migrant workers often feel devalued in and by labor, mobility is presented as their only way forward—as well as their ticket home.

A growing ethnographic literature attends to maintenance and repair practices in the face of decay and ruination. This article explores the forms of decay that become an integral part of infrastructure maintenance. In Turkey's Çoruh Basin, hydroelectric dam constructions lead to a concern about the landscape's erosive character, which requires foresters' practices of watershed rehabilitation in the uplands to protect the dams against sediment accumulation in the reservoirs. The work of repairing ecologies for the long-term maintenance of dams, I contend, is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor—that is, the villagers' arduous practices of tending landscape through farming and husbandry. Through an ethnographic study of how foresters and villagers experience the landscape under rehabilitation, this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying, tracing the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. I argue that maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay.

I decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. Through fieldwork with hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, I look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what I call sensate ecologies. A sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual subject of urban theory. What I describe here as drivers' sensate ecological relations with a difficult city—a condition that is usually considered ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable—calls into question assumptions about ecological damage and precarious urban life. By analyzing taxi driving as relational, sensate work. rather than as precarious labor, I argue that urban sensate ecologies produce expertise for hereditary drivers that sustain over generations. I conclude that even unsustainable ecological onslaughts of automobility produce coexistence and sustainable social and sensate relations.