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. 1 (2023)
The February 2023 issue of Cultural Anthropology is the first issue edited by the collective of Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Julia Elyachar, Joanne Nucho, AbdouMaliq Simone, Manuel Tironi, and Ather Zia and features six research articles.
In “Of Feral and Obedient Cows,” Valentina Bonifacio offers an analysis of the relationship between cattle and humans in the colonization of the Paraguayan Chaco that reveals the history of “domestication” as a racialized operator of colonial and metropolitan extractivism.
In “Evasion,” David C. Thompson engages with long-term travesti interlocutors in Rio de Janeiro, where the realities of racialized capture are not structurally attenuated, but are inhabited in ways that modulate the experiences of confinement and produce temporalities of provisional autonomy.
In her multi-sensorial ethnography of hereditary Muslim taxi drivers in Mumbai, Tarini Bedi takes us through the bumpy roads and dusty air of the city, illuminating how drivers’ skillful navigation of sensate ecologies redescribes our conventional understanding of sustainable urban environments.
In his article, Liron Shani draws on long-term fieldwork in the Arava/Arabah region of southern Israel/Palestine to elucidate the networks of connections that make agriculture possible as a political enterprise. His case study of shifting definitions of alien/native species, and of boundaries between the human and non-human under Zionist regimes of settlement, sheds light on matters of “agriculture infrastructure” more broadly.
In “Future Returns,” Anna Simone Reumert shows how incessant mobility is a defining element of the capacity to work in much of Sudan. Reumert links earning to indebtedness in an economy oriented around extracting profit from movement.
Ekin Kurtiç’s essay on dam maintenance through watershed rehabilitation in Turkey invites us to pay greater attention to breakdown and decay as vital to maintenance. Through her careful ethnography, Kurtiç calls for challenging a “maintenance-decay” binary in a way that is important to think with in this moment of catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
Cover image by Tarini Bedi.
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