Building the Human Economy

The author has always been sceptical about the use of value theory in anthropology. Here he considers its scope in relation to a project linked to the publication of The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide in 2010. This international project, …

ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter

In this 21st century, the enormous scale and extent of social inequalities and ecological devastation prompt us to revisit the relevance and positionality of anthropology as a discipline and a societal project. how then to address systemic…

The Mother of Awashi

In September 2020, a video circulating on social media plunged he country of Mozambique into a deep moral crisis. The video showed five young men, dressed in the uniform of the Mozambican army, cruelly whipping a naked woman along a road and…

Negotiating Consent in African Studies

Informed consent has been increasingly equated with standardized models and legal jargon. At Scandinavian universities, researchers are expected to adhere to European standardized models and institutional forms, necessitating documentable (p…

Form, Formats, and Forms of Informed Consent

This article reflects on the unforeseen dynamics revealed as we presented written consent forms to be signed by our interlocutors during fieldwork in Djibouti and Namibia. Throughout the article we analyse how the consent form (in its legali…

Knowing Digital Governance from Below

This paper considers the question of what it is to ‘know’ digital governance through an experiential, bottom-up lens, and presents some empirical detail from recent fieldwork with feminist movement actors in northern India – both formally or…

Rebel Attentiveness

Living under Israeli occupation, Palestinians face countless controls over their daily lives and movement. This research focuses on the reflections of cycling group founders and participants in the occupied West Bank, who ride despite effort…

Training as a Rite of Passage

Following the transformative journey of Kenyan geothermal professionals throughout a training programme in Iceland and back to their homes, I argue that such long-term training in foreign countries can function as a rite of passage. The coll…

Water Drops

This article examines how individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds in Norway participate in anti-racist activism via social media. It investigates the nature of digital activism compared to traditional paradigms, highlighting the varied f…

Afterword

In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue ‘Music, Affect and Politics’ to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialis…

Street Rhythms and the Revolution

Cuban street vendors use pregones, high-pitched rhymes and rhythms, to promote their goods and services. This ambulant form of small-scale commerce has been part of the urban soundscape since the early years of Spanish colonization. While of…

Affective Turn, or Return?

The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and …

Music, Phones and Bank Loans

This article explores the making of two branded Spotify playlists to critique the concept of ‘affective labor.’ Over the last few decades, scholars have argued that social media users and creative industries workers alike are engaged in a ne…

Neoliberalism and the Opportunodemic

It would be far too unkind to suggest that academics and journalists have presented the COVID-19 pandemic in isolation from its broader economic context. However, it would be less unkind to suggest that its location in a triptych of major cr…

Zagaku

The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and traini…

Debt and Emotional Labour in Present Day Serbia

This article deals with the affective aspects of indebtedness in present-day Serbia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belgrade and Šabac during the period 2016-19, it analyses gendered aspects of affective states created and trig…

Measuring Humans Through Money

This introduction to the special issue outlines important anthropological insights into debt relations and relations of indebtedness drawing on my own research on post-Soviet economies as well as on the contributions to this special issue. T…