Cultural Anthropology publishes ethnographic writing informed by a wide array of theoretical perspectives, innovative in form and content, and focused on both traditional and emerging topics. It also welcomes essays concerned with ethnographic methods and research design in historical perspective, and with ways cultural analysis can address broader public audiences and interests.
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Vol. 38 No. 3 (2023)
We present five original papers in this issue.
Chloe Ahmann, in her ethnography of the conspiratorial politics surrounding the construction of a waste incinerator in South Baltimore, asks “What do rumors theorize?” In a late industrial context where corporate powers promote a lethal status quo, rumor-mongering emerges as a tactical affordance for interscalar change, connecting dots and plots where industrial power would rather insist on keeping them apart.
Shozab Raza explores how peasant revolutionary movements in Balochistan, through the concept of conjugation, attempt to simultaneously connect and transform the vernaculars of political struggle, otherwise construed as particular, into a more universal frame of reference.
Douaa Sheet disrupts common understandings about national reconciliation commissions in Tunisia that celebrate “voice” and the dissemination of information on social media as essential to “healing.” Instead, we see the importance of strategic silence and “gaps in knowledge” in the forging of empathetic publics and the mediating of reconciliation.
José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri illustrate how both bakers in Amman and soldiers in Baghdad are enrolled in bureaucratic assemblages, taming people, and things to make them congenial to the state effect through work that the authors describe as “bureaucraft.”
Zeynep Oguz analyzes how the “absent presence” of oil and “indeterminacy of the underground” intertwine to shape political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation in post-Ottoman Turkey.
Cover image by Chloe Ahmann.
After the words “America” and “United States,” President Donald Trump mentioned sovereignty more than any other topic in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly... More
Has hope become a word that betrays you? In an escalating “war on words” (van Eekelen et al. 2004, 1), has hope bulldozed over our dreams? During the 2008 U.S.... More
This collection gathers five articles previously published in Cultural Anthropology, by Hayder Al-Mohammad, Kenneth George, Naveeda Khan, Arzoo Osanloo, and... More
Recent trends in social theory have placed great importance on affect for both analytic and political reasons, but the term is somewhat vague and ambiguous.... More