Social Analysis

The article explores how detachment and separation affect the politics of relatedness and belonging within enterprising families in Russia and structure access to resources. I situate family disputes, claim-making, and struggles over property within the broader dynamics of Russian capitalism and the informal techniques of risk management performed through manipulations of assets and ownership rights. The ethnography of divorce demonstrates that the degrees of exclusion can significantly vary, ranging from direct attempts to cut off an ex-spouse from household, sentiment, and property, to more ambivalent modes of belonging that I call ‘exclusive inclusion’. The article treats detachment not only as a social fact but also as an analytic lens that highlights the productive potential of disengagement in the study of modern family and relatedness.

This article attends to spectral experiences surrounding 5G infrastructure and risks associated with electromagnetic fields through ethnographic fieldwork in Germany and the UK, exploring them in their specificity as a spectral manner of being. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's figuring of the specter as a ‘structural opening’ and Isabelle Stengers's concept of ‘disclosure’, we trace three spectral moments—attunements to an equivocal spectrum, dis/possessed bodies, and a ghosted public—that disturb modern ontologies and epistemologies, disclosing an Otherworld within. The article, moreover, contributes to anthropological discussions on unstable ontologies in the context of climate change. It argues that spectrality is a useful analytic for tending to ontological uncertainties, sensitizing us to exposures that are imperceptible within the logics of technoscientific knowledge.

This article expands our understanding of data review by foregrounding the affective labor it entails. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research with Israeli medical bureaucrats, I examine how they transform dubious pharmaceutical trial data into ‘trustworthy enough’ foundations for policy decisions. Preparing files for Israel's universal healthcare program, bureaucrats must rely on clinical trials they deem unreliable. Following this process, I highlight the pivotal role of a deliberately cultivated mood of suspicion. Grounded in phenomenological philosophy, I argue that suspicion is not merely a passive backdrop but an effortful achievement shaping how data is reviewed. This study demonstrates that data review involves not only analytical tasks but also the affective work of entering and sustaining the mooded state necessary for critical engagement.

When people clean their bodies, clothes, or kitchens, they dirty the water. In the Netherlands, that which is technologically impossible or too costly to remove from wastewater flows out from wastewater treatment plants with the effluent, where it can harm aquatic organisms. In an attempt to grapple with household emissions, the water sector is charged with increasing awareness about these harmful effects so that people can change their behavior. In this article, we draw on interviews with ‘environmentally aware’ household cleaners to explore non-polluting cleaning practices. We reflect on the limits of what can be practically accomplished and suggest that a focus on ‘valuing’ can lead to important insights for the water sector to draw on.

Death is commonly associated with danger and pollution, and in China morticians and other death workers have long been stigmatized. Rapid social changes and urbanization notwithstanding, such work is still perceived as ‘dirty’ across the four dimensions recognized in the scholarship on stigma (physical, social, moral, and emotional). Based on fieldwork in a mortuary in southern China, we add a fifth dimension of stigma: the spiritual pollution that taints morticians, who are believed to be in constant contact with restless ghosts.

Individualism among the Aents Chicham of today's northern Peru and eastern Ecuador is defined as singularity through exemplarity. Adult men achieve such uniqueness in agonistic relationships. Major advances in the studies of Aents Chicham and Amazonian anthropology make it possible to clarify the contours of this ‘wild’ form of individualism, in contrast with our own (Euro-American) brand of individualism. These differences go some way in explaining the misunderstandings that arise when Chicham people engage with White and Mestizo outsiders.

What have advances in transplant science meant for our understandings of the human condition? Beginning with The Intruder, Jean-Luc Nancy's account of his heart transplant, I reflect on the realities of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. I argue that the substitutability of immunity, the uneasy cellular relations, and the curative role of sustained violence in these procedures unsettle symbolic frameworks of exclusive selfhood and sovereignty on which moral economies of shared substance have long been built. The logic of the transplanted graft—an intentional dislocation and a creative joining—captures a human reality of constant, even necessary ‘intrusion’. It is a logic that is simultaneously disruptive and life-giving, and one that medical transplants today push to the extreme.