Singing Wives and Oligarch Patrons

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on Swedo-Russian musical collaborations, this article explores the link between popular music and the conspicuous consumption of Russia’s wealthy elite. Presenting two specific cases, one following a…

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…

Revolutionaries as Political Women

The purpose of studying women’s participation in radical movements, as the classical study We Were Making History notes, is ‘an attempt to broaden the history of that struggle by recovering the subjective experience of women, to capture wome…

Covid-19 and the Future of Work

This paper offers a critical reflection on the impact of Covid-19 and government public health measures on patterns of work in the UK. This paper will focus specifically on remote or home workers as this generates myriad questions about the …

Marriage, Divorce and Mutual Indebtedness

This article offers an original insight on the gift economy in Tajikistan. As long shown by the literature, ceremonial expenditures sustain social status and convey moral obligations and social order. In this context, we find that marriage b…

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…

Debt Relations in Georgian Bazaars

This article is about practices of borrowing and lending money in the context of Georgian bazaar trade. While many anthropological studies focus on debtors or individual moneylenders, this article starts from the perspective of microcredit e…

Making Friends and Playing the Game

Bribery relations are a way to cope with the uncertainties of everyday life for many people living in Tanzania. For members of the Tanzanian Indian communities, the uncertainties not only count the faltering bureaucratic systems and a state …

Manhattan-Hanover Transfer

by Lutz Hieber and Gisela Theising We got to know Douglas Crimp, maven of New York AIDS activist art, in the summer of 1990. He seemed to us to be the living embodiment of an intellectual. Jean Paul Sartre describes intellectuals as being concerned wit…

The Haunting of a Modernism Conceived Differently

by Matthew Bowman Another Modernism Douglas Crimp’s exceptional reputation as an art critic is, of course, in many respects intertwined with his early theorization of postmodernism within the context of fine art. Especially important in this context wa…

Cultivating (In)attention, Listening to Noise

by Emily Bock Featured image: Chantal Regnault, Legendary Voguer Willi Ninja wearing a Thierry Mugler body piece, 1989. Photo courtesy of the photographer. For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to …

The House That Ghosts Built (And Mediums Performed)

By Paula Vilaplana de Miguel Featured image: Seances, a popular entertainment in the late 19th century, under a red light. *The following work acknowledges that the phenomenon of haunting is neither uniquely Western nor exclusively related to the Spiri…