In the first decade of the 21st century, a new niche opened up in the street economy of Cusco, a city in the Southern Peruvian Andes: the sale of calls between mobile phones. This article shows that the neoliberal policies of deregulation that enabled the mobile phone call business have also produced new regulatory spaces that small‐scale entrepreneurs have to manage in their relationships to the authorities. Through the story of a family business, the author discusses the relationships between precariousness, informality, uncertainty and ambiguity, and focuses on the tensions that arise in kinship relationships that are affective and supportive, yet also exploitative. The main argument is that there are different modes of precarity, and that kinship, which mostly has been thought of as security in an uncertain world, in fact can exacerbate a precarious condition.

Petric, Boris. 2015. Where are all our sheep? Kyrgyzstan, a global political arena. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 170 pp. Hb.: US$90.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐78238‐783‐1.

Nienke Van Der Heide

Alanen, Leena, Liz Brooker and Berry Mayall (eds.) 2015. Childhood with Bourdieu. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 215 pp. Pb.: £60. ISBN: 9781137384737.

Alice Sophie Sarcinelli

Broz, Ludek and Daniel Münster (eds.) 2015. Suicide and agency: anthropological perspectives on self‐destruction, personhood, and powerFarnham: Ashgate. 240 pp. Hb.: US$119.95. ISBN: 9781472457912.

Toomas Gross

Hovens, Pieter and Mette van der Hooft (eds.) 2016. Indian detours: tourism in Native North America. Havertown, PA: Sidestone Press. 224 pp. Pb.: €34.95. ISBN: 9789088903366.

Nicholas Barron

La Fontaine, Jean. 2016. Witches and demons: a comparative perspective on witchcraft and Satanism Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 150 pp. Pb.: US$27.95. ISBN: 9781785331527.

Joel Christian Reed

Schober, Elisabeth. 2016. Base encounters: the U.S. armed forces in South Korea. London: Pluto Press. 214 pp. Pb.: US$34.00. ISBN: 9780745336053.

Bridget Martin

Flammang, Janet A. 2016. Table talk: building democracy one meal at a time. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. 280 pp. Pb.: US$25.00. ISBN: 9780252081743.

Meg Turville‐Heitz

Alber, Erdmute and Heike Drotbohm (eds.) 2015. Anthropological perspectives on care: work, kinship, and the life course Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 256 pp. Hb.: $105.00. ISBN: 9781137513434.

Andrea García González

Jaffe, Rivke and Anouk de Koning. 2016. Introducing urban anthropology. London, New York: Routledge. 185 pp. Pb.: €42. ISBN: 9781107694699.

Silke Oldenburg

Cox, Rupert, Andrew Irving and Christopher Wright (eds.) 2016. Beyond text?: critical practices and sensory anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hb.: £75. ISBN: 9780719085055.

Carlo Cubero

Jackson, Michael and Albert Piette (eds.) 2015. What is existential anthropology? New York: Berghahn Books. 248 pp. Hb.: US$95.00. ISBN: 9781782386360.

Aidan Seale‐Feldman

Kajanus, Anni. 2015. Chinese student migration, gender and family. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 194 pp. Hb.: US$74.99. ISBN: 9781137509093.

I‐Chieh Fang

Joniak‐Lüthi, Agnieszka. 2015. The Han: China's diverse majority. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 187 pp. Hb.: US$67.20. ISBN: 9780295994673; ISBN: 0295994673.

Bo Chen

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

Jamie Coates

Focusing on anthropological publications in Europe‐based journals in 2016, this review reflects on the politicisation of anthropology in recent years, tracing the contours of this scholarship through the trope of ‘edges’. From debates about the marginalisation of Euro‐anthropology and analyses of lives ‘on edge’ within Europe, to efforts to push political thinking to its conceptual edges as a form of ‘alter‐politics’, this review explores the ‘edgy’ politics of Euro‐anthropology in 2016. The paper examines how the edges of state and solidarity, self and sociality, human and non‐human futures intersect in the political emphasis of European scholarship in 2016. At the same time, it critically reflects on how and why it is important not to allow this form of political optimism to turn into Eurocentrism, arguing for the continued importance of comparison and encounter outside of epistemic central Anglo‐European worlds.

Wilkinson, Iain and Arthur Kleinman. 2016. A passion for society: how we think about human suffering Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 205 pp. Pb.: US$85. ISBN: 9780520287235

Sandhya Fuchs

Anthropological futures

For a critical political economy of capitalist time

Laura Bear

This essay deploys two articles that Firth wrote on the future of anthropology in addition to his accounts of Tikopia dreams to reveal a hidden ethics of time characteristic of anthropology. Our discipline is grounded in a taken‐for‐granted secular humanism. This has led to rich reflection on contrasting values and theories of ethics. I will argue, however, that in order for our discipline to become an uncomfortable science in relation to conventional economics and to address issues of inequality we need to supplement this inheritance. We need to construct a critical political economy of capitalist time. This would explicitly engage with the material timescapes of inequality in which ethics, knowledges and techniques of capitalist time interact. I demonstrate how such an analysis of time works in my own research on austerity policy on the Hooghly River. I then turn this approach onto the current institutional conditions of anthropology in the UK – that of financialised universities governed by debt. I conclude by suggesting some of my own utopian futures for anthropology, which are guided by a social calculus drawn from the ethics of the precarious working poor.

The Syrian Civil War, sectarianism and political change at the Turkish–Syrian border

Şule Can

The Syrian Civil War has displaced millions of Syrian citizens since March 2011 and has drastically changed the lives of those in the Turkish–Syrian borderlands. Antakya (Hatay), which was annexed by the Republic of Turkey from Syria under the French Mandate in 1939, is a border province that hosts tens of thousands of Syrian refugees today. Although the province has long been renowned for its ethnic and religious diversity, the influx of Syrian refugees and Turkey's Syria policy have created new ethno‐religious conflicts and have shifted the dynamics of everyday life in Antakya. Drawing on micro‐historical approaches towards boundary‐making and state formation, this ethnographic study focuses first on how the Syrian Civil War has transformed urban everyday life in this border city and has redefined ethno‐religious boundaries and locals’ relationships to the state since 2011. Second, this article investigates the ways in which ‘sectarianism’ is implicated in the Turkish regime's approach to the Syrian Civil War and how sectarian discourses have shifted the political landscape in Antakya. This project suggests that in international conflicts between neighbouring states, the spatial, political and social divisions in border cities will increase as ethnic and religious identities become more politicised.

Arai, Andrea Gevurtz. 2016. The strange child: education and the psychology of patriotism in recessionary Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 233 pp. Pb.: US$25.95. ISBN: 9780804798532.

Grant J. Rich

The act of knowing and the indeterminacy of the known in Huichol contexts (Mexico)

Angel AedoPaulina Faba

In the Huichol localities of Jalisco and Nayarit, the act of knowing is described as a transformational experience in which conceptions of truth and values circulate in interactions between human and non‐human agents. By analysing critical notions, ritual experiences and assemblages of things, this paper examines Huichol forms of knowledge through four phenomena: the anticipation of experience, the indeterminacy of the known, the presence of visual indexes of agency and becoming, and the shifting of subjectivities. Using the insights gained from this ethnographic study, the paper ends by arguing that the ways in which ritual actions, narratives and visual elements are entangled create ‘relational fields’, which need to be examined in order to understand the experiences of knowledge in Huichol contexts.

Retrospective ethnography on 20th‐century Portugal

Fieldwork encounters and its complicities

Sónia FerreiraSónia Vespeira De Almeida

The present article seeks to promote an epistemological, but also a methodological, discussion around the importance of the dialogical moments stimulated by a ‘retrospective ethnography’ (Almeida , ) in two different studies on 20th‐century pre‐ and post‐revolutionary Portugal. The first of these explores the memories of resistance amongst Portuguese working women in the Lisbon south banks during the 1930s and 1940s (Ferreira ); the second (Almeida ) deals with discourses on national identity in the post‐revolutionary period, following the so‐called ‘Carnation Revolution’ that occurred on 25 April 1974, taking the Cultural Dynamisation Campaigns (Campanhas de Dinamização Cultural do MFA) as its field research. We aim on the one hand to identify proximities and distances between remembrance processes that are anchored in different historical and political moments but are both penetrated by a moment of historical acceleration, and on the other hand to explore the methodological demands and difficulties of working in a ubiquitous ethnographic arena, between past and present, memory and history, underexposure and overexposure in the last 50 years of Portuguese history.

Editorial

Sarah GreenPatrick Laviolette

Social Anthropology

Anthropologie sociale

Volume 25 Issue 2

Issue Information

Stepputat, Finn (ed.) 2014. Governing the dead: sovereignty and the politics of dead bodies. Human Remains and Violence series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 272 pp. Hb.: £75.00. ISBN: 9780719096082.

Schneider, A. and C. Wright (eds.) 2015. Anthropology and art practice. London: Bloomsbury. 168 pp. Pb.: £55. ISBN: 9780857851796.

Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology

Steinmüller, Hans and Susanne Brandstädter (eds.) 2016. Irony, cynicism and the Chinese state. New York: Routledge. 193 pp. Hb.: US$145. ISBN: 978-1-138-94314-8.

Precarious entrepreneurship

Mobile phones, work and kinship in neoliberal Peru