We are delighted to publish the first ever Spanish-language article in Cultural Anthropology. David Lagunas’s text offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of the migration and arrival of Roma in Mexico, examining more closely how they negotiate and strategize today over the visual resources of their cultural identity vis-a-vis the racializing politics of the Mexican state.

What are the biophysical and emotional thresholds of hunger and what does it take for people in vulnerable communities to navigate them? For low-income communities in Luzon Island (Philippines), pantawid-gutom offers a provisional and fleeting means to distract themselves from the bodily demands of hunger. Gideon Lasco and Jhaki Mendoza’s ethnography of such alimentary distractions—from drugs to water or staples—offers a unique vantage point into the dynamic and material semiotics of urban poverty.

Can recycling bins designed to promote environmental sustainability promote racial exclusion and stigmatization instead? In her ethnography of EU-aligned environmental programmes in Sofia, Bulgaria, Elana Resnick shows how racial discrimination against the Roma is enacted in bins designed to keep the hands of scavengers out, thus perpetuating a long history of statist containment of Roma populations through analogies with waste management.

Randeep Hothi examines the co-figuration of Sikh memorial practices sensitive to a martyrdom that simultaneously emphasizes the connectedness of all things and curates a collective memory of incessant marginalization—now expressed, particularly in the diaspora, as an agonism to against racial supremacy and liberal political forms, yet confronts a largely “homeland” based politics of incremental recognition.

Whereas the idea of eternity often imposes itself upon us as an evanescent horizon of everlasting timelessness, for practicing Orthodox Christians in Serbia, writes Nicholas Lackenby in this evocative ethnography, eternity gains salience as a space of contemporaneous interaction with our departed, thus acquiring specific social affordances and characteristics. Rather than a temporal regime of changelessness, then, the eternal becomes a resource for social change.

Low-income women working at an animal shelter in South Korea confront a refractive emotional complex whereby their labor of care and affection towards animals proves difficult to disentangle from the conditions of gendered exploitation they often find themselves in. In this rich ethnography of the animal-rights industry, EuyRyung Jun analyzes the messy and often invisible layering of, on the one hand, human and animal suffering, and on the other, the ethics of work and activism, into a “politics of interspecies pity.”

Cover and table-of-contents image by Elana Resnick.