Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Peer monitoring is a common feature of homosocialization among girls in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. This article examines the important ethical work that takes place in moments of sociability between peers in and beyond school grounds. Student…
The Karimojong prophet Apaokere was called by Divinity in a dream to sacrifice. In this vision, Divinity instructed him to kill a prized dark ox for the women of his household to avoid the onset of “nothingness.” This two-part essay (the first part pub…
Focusing on welfare challenges and crises encountered by women in contemporary Vietnam, this article examines the gendering of morality and the ways in which a feminized ethics of care is entangled with women’s practice of the social capacity tình cảm …
This article illustrates the religious formation and subjectivation of a nun through her everyday life inside the convent. It explains how her experience of calling, structured through institutional subject formation, leads to the fashioning of an ethi…
In this article, I focus on the reentry of Chinese Indonesians into both politics and public religious life in Indonesia in the post-Suharto era. I argue that while entry into local politics has led to new forms of interethnic and interreligious compet…
From the late 1960s onwards simulation games were adopted by development education programs as an ethical and pedagogical tool to create awareness of the “true” nature of reality. This article explores both the limits and ongoing effects of simulation …
The formation of Catholic seminarians in Sri Lanka is dependent on rigorous prayer and study routines that are designed to shape a seminarian’s disposition towards religious life. These mechanisms are geared towards transforming youthful desires into v…
I follow here three different prophetic movements in Africa with which I have been closely engaged. I highlight the singularity of the prophet vis-à-vis the group, as well as the difficulties built into the ethnographic method to combine the study of s…
The use of tropes is a defining feature of resource regulation and is fundamental to both the way legal theories have evolved and to the practical, localized interpretations and implementations of law. This article offers a discursive study of the “wat…
If constructed as planned, the Sites Reservoir Project will add roughly 1.85 billion m3 (1.5 million acre-feet) of storage capacity to California’s water system. Per project proponents, however, the reservoir complex should be understood as infrastruct…
This article examines the role of working people in the energy transition that played out in Puerto Rico in the 1930s and 1940s – from a private, fossil fuel-based regime to a public, hydroelectric system. It argues that by withholding their labo…
For many, the coal industry in Colombia has been synonymous with progress, economic growth and access to education and housing opportunities on the Caribbean mining frontier. However, little has been said about the slow, dosed and silent violence that …
While much has been published in anthropological discourse and teaching forums about the skills, practices and positionality of ethnographic writing, very little attention has been paid to the practices and experiences of ethnographic reading. Our proj…
Thinking ecologically about food reminds us that « eating is an agricultural act (enfing) the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth » (Berry, W. 1992)
A l’heure des changements sociaux et environnementaux glo…
Thinking ecologically about food reminds us that « eating is an agricultural act (enfing) the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth » (Berry, W. 1992)
At a time of global social and environmental changes (Bla…
Raúl Matta, 2023. From the Plate to Gastro-Politics Unravelling the Boom of Peruvian Cuisine. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. 300p.
La transformación que ha sufrido la gastronomía peruana en los últimos 20 años es, sin dudas, radical. Por dar un…
“The Anthropologist’s Toolkit: Reflections on ethnographic methodology” is a new essay series that peers into the anthropologist’s toolkit to reflect on what ethnographic methodology constitutes in all its multimodal forms. We invite all contributions …
Since the beginning of February this year, Suomen antropologi: Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society has navigated a succession. The previous editors-in-chief, Heikki Wilenius and Tuomas Tammisto, passed their roles on to me, Suvi Rautio, and I ha…
This article draws on ethnographic material from life stories and nonfiction literature and is complemented by fieldwork vignettes. The material is used to discuss how experiences of connections and disconnections between past and present, self and int…
The Tzen oil palm plantation in the northwestern corner of Wide Bay in Pomio District, East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea is a highly infrastructured space. Roads surround and order the oil palm plantings into a grid-like space and connect the…
As the dramatic consequences of climate change finally begin to motivate governments around the world to explore how to move away from a dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power is back on the agenda in the UK as a potential energy source. However, th…
Fredrik Barth called attention to two ways ritually transmitted knowledge gains value: knowledge he associated with the figure of the ‘Guru’ valued for being widely shared versus knowledge associated with the figure of the ‘conjurer’ or ‘initiator’ val…
Jones, Reece. White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall. Beacon Press. 2021. 239 pp. ISBN: 9780807054062 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780807007266 (softcover), ISBN: 9780807054123 (ebook).
This paper looks at the theme of collaboration through the prism of game design, and especially the example of serious games. At its heart, this is a consideration of two collaborative projects between experts. The first is a current collaboration betw…
Every day around the globe, people go missing for any number of reasons. Some disappearances are intentional, others are enforced by oppressive political regimes or the result of natural disasters. Whatever the reason, these disappearances produce fami…