We present seven original papers in this issue.

Skepticism and parody come together in Gregory Hollin’s original approach to professional wrestling in contexts of post-truth politics and labor precarity. Focusing on a recent effort to unionize professional wrestlers in Britain, the article explores the blurred lines between wrestlers’ staged "work" and real "shoots" under neoliberal working conditions in which most wrestlers are precarious independent contractors seeking to incorporate unique angles into already scripted performances.

What happens when revolutionary militants take power? How do martyrdom and revolutionary sacrifice turn into civil and bureaucratic projects? In 2002, the Turkish city of Diyarbakır became a “laboratory of sovereign rule” for the Kurdish movement when pro-Kurdish parties gained municipal power in the city. In her ethnography with participants in the movement, Esin Düzel explores how the “afterlives of sacrifice” diffract the complex temporalities of both revolution and democratization.

Based on multimodal and hybrid ethnography of disinformation during the Brazilian presidential elections of 2022, this essay discusses different modes of resistance to what Mihai Andrei Leaha and Roger Canals call “alternative images.” 

Working with a long history of river engineering in the Himalayas, Saumya Pandey’s essay examines how recomposing conceptualizations of river sediments as embodiments of geological instability acts as an ethical imperative for the capitalist extraction of sand, also reframed as environmental and humanitarian concerns.

Working with the aftermath of massive floods in India’s Rudraprayag region, Gideon Mathson introduces the notion of collective witnessing as a means of engaging the prolongation of trauma that ensues in the resurfacing of fractures and disjunction that characterize the “real” of human communities, and where the efforts to restore a sense of societal coherence require an inventiveness of the past.

Maira Hayat’s essay explores everyday bureaucratic work in Pakistan’s Punjab region through centralizing ethical labor and how it engages with law and religion.

Working with the political present in Iran, Mirco Göpfert presents cartooning as a form of engaged knowing intertwining perceptive sensibility, analysis, and moral commitment capable of living with dissonance, and entails important implications for expanding the scope of anthropological thought.

Cover and table-of-contents image by Saumya Pandey.