We present seven original papers in this issue.

In “On Chainsaws and Acoustic Violence,” Andrew Green shows how sound is part of complex multisensory and social entanglements that shape how people respond to deforestation.

In “Religious Afterlives of a Revolution,” Amira Mittermaier analyzes how upper-middle-class Egyptians, who participated in the 2011 uprising, are turning to Sufism, yoga, and meditation as part of a search for a personal connection to God.

In “Good Digestion,” Else Vogel introduces the notion of metabolic politics as a theoretical frame for understanding contested forms of governing biochemical flows and more-than-human eating and feeding relations. Vogel takes the nitrogen crisis as an exemplary case of contemporary debates over the environmental effects of industrial food production, and shows how metabolic politics unequally accentuate vulnerabilities among us. A more-than-human biopolitics, Vogel argues, must engage how metabolic relations are known, problematized, and become a field of intervention. 

In “Isha’s Wait,” Garima Jaju shows how money shapes the experience of domestic violence and its aftermath and how, in turn, tenuous monetary settlements through the legal system sustain visions of reformed kinship futures. 

In “Blessed Acts of Oblivion,” Paolo Heywood explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self through analysis of fieldwork in Predappio, Italy, which has emblematic status in relation to Italian Fascism. 

In “Love as Enjoyment,” Akanksha Awal explores urban young middle-class women’s approaches to love (pyaar), intimacy, and pleasure beyond marriage expectations, as well as changing gender norms and Bollywood-style romances. By seeking pleasure in casual encounters at new retail malls and parks, which these women call “enjoyment,” these women claim that love emerges anew: a playful space for pleasure, self-affirmation, and personal freedom that allows them to experience desire without commitment. 

In “How to Sustain a Strike,” Nishita Trisal draws on fieldwork ​​in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the site of a nearly eighty-year struggle for self-determination, to show how a longterm general strike and the suspension of daily life it entailed was sustained through novel spatiotemporal techniques that coordinated and routinized actions of the Kashmiri public. 

Cover and table-of-contents image by Amira Mittermaier.