In this issue, we present eleven original papers with ethnographic insights into topics ranging from evasion and repair to belonging across African, Asian, and European geographies.

In “Out of Time?” Cathrine Degnen interweaves the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the increasingly pervasive ageist discourses of interrupted or foreclosed futures in Great Britain to examine how temporality is enrolled in imagining generational difference through exclusionary practices and discourses and how the category of “older persons” is made and experienced.

In “Act Blur, Live Longer,”James McGrail deploys the notion of blurring as a strategy of evading both censorship and the categories produced through an array of “smart technologies” employed by the state. Through the works of three Muslim women artists in Singapore, McGrail demonstrates how people resist state categorization by complicating the limits of those categories and compositional practices productive of definitive identities.

Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia’s essay draws on years of fieldwork in Taranto, a southern Italian city dominated by Europe’s largest steel plant, to ask how the slow violence of industrial poisoning can be registered ethnographically when its harms remain unevenly perceptible and causally elusive. Through three sets of photographs taken in the city’s contaminated cemetery, she develops “flickering” as a method for attending to what hovers between the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead. 

Beginning with her search for a repairman to fix a broken sink in her apartment as a newcomer to Sarajevo, Halide Velioğlu unfolds a powerful and moving analysis of the gendered labor of repair that stretches across material objects, community ties, family honor, and political restitution in postwar Bosnia. In a setting where many things (including social bonds) are broken, Velioğlu shows that making  things run smoothly is a critical form of labor that allows the transformation of a damaged house—and home—into one that has been repaired, even if some may choose to live with the visible traces of brokenness. 

In face of oscillating and intense state sponsored violence, Robbie Peters explores how pigeon racing in a low-income neighborhood of Surabaya, Indonesia is an equivocal political activity that blends  into the thickets of entangled interaction that happen in plain sight and draw men together across scattered dense alleys and dissonant scales in ways that retain dissonance as a mode of protection.

In “Wounds in Utopia,” Max López Toledano draws on ethnographic research with LGBT+ football teams in Mexico to show how communities previously at the margins of the nation make claims to respectability and national belong, even as they develop surprising alliances with political parties across the lines of electoral politics in Mexico. In the essay, we see a broad array of political paradoxes that accompany the country’s gay football scene—a space of “wounds in utopia” where wounds, healing, and violence coexist. 

In “Alienating ‘Dead Capital,’ Eating Moral Principle,” Peter Lockwood examines how patriarchal norms of land retention are eroded as male landowners convert ancestral land into funds for consumption, producing “binge economies” that reshape moral and economic life on Nairobi’s frontier.

In “Hierarchical Precarity,” Juan Chen analyzes how the gendered and intimate economies of dance hosting in China pivot on masculine insecurities, highlighting how precarious work and precarious life are intertwined with everyday survival.

Yue Liao explores structural transformations within post-socialist China and how they produce emergent subjectivities at the margins of competing mobility regimes. Through the concept of inter-mobility, the author shows how middle-aged Chinese farmers use greenhouse technology to carve out a deliberate position between the rootlessness of the urban entrepreneurial class and the immobility of the elderly peasantry. 

Anjali Krishan examines the range of emotions, sentiments, and sensations in selected suicide stories of middle-class Indian women, uncovering how women engage with prevailing narratives around what constitutes worthwhile lives and articulate concomitant ethical responses through acts of storytelling.

In “Rust and Reparations,” Charline Kopf analyzes how repair as replacement in the context of Senegal’s Railway involves careful and ongoing bricolage that can in the longer run prove harmful. Ongoing repair, the author shows, can also lead to destruction, even as repair is not only essential, but can be creative. 

Cover and table-of-contents image by Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia.