Social Anthropology

Firat, Bilge. 2019. Diplomacy and lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: the private life of politics (Political Ethnography). Manchester: Manchester University Press. 224 pp. Hb. US$90.00. ISBN: 1526133628.

Traffic in mega‐urban Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) demonstrates the transformative powers of vehicles and transport infrastructures. Like eddies of a river, traffic flows are abiotic actors – other‐than‐human physical phenomena that influence how traffic makes its way. But the liquid sense of flow in Vietnamese imaginings has unique qualities that challenge singular conceptualisations of the Anthropocene. Moving beyond human‐centredness, this paper re‐imagines traffic of metropolitan HCMC as the ()‐cene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine transformations of diurnal patterns of banal journey‐making where infrastructure routinely fails and ask how abiotic actors shape ways of inhabiting the Anthropocene and living with roads.

Cars are celebrated as the technical and symbolic epitome of modernity but are also heavily implicated in the making of climate change, imbricated within a seemingly all‐powerful global capitalist system. What can an anthropological analysis of traffic in urban areas tell us about the enduring strength of this system? While cars in Beirut are both desired and necessary to move about, strong feelings of frustration are taking shape among residents and commuters who face the ever‐congested roads of the capital city daily. This mounting frustration indexes an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ towards everyday automobility that has created explicit and concrete desire for alternative mobilities, particularly public transport, which scholars of automobility had pronounced dead. In this light, while cars remain objects of desire, in Beirut as elsewhere, an ‘excess’ of automobility – of modernity, we might say – is in fact weakening the dominance of cars, exposing a potential brittleness previously undetected. Acknowledging this process forces us to reconsider our modernist assumptions about the inevitable predominance of cars and offers hope for alternative mobility futures.

Ambiguous entanglements

Infrastructure, memory and identity in indigenous Evenki communities along the Baikal–Amur Mainline

Interstitial urban spaces

Housing strategies and the use of the city by homeless asylum seekers and refugees in Trento, Italy

The potential of intangible loss

Reassembling heritage and reconstructing the social in post‐disaster Japan

This historical materialist analysis places rankings into the imperatives both to govern and to accumulate, and positions academic ranking in particular as the telos of a more general audit culture. By identifying how rankings effect not merely a quantification of qualities, but a numeration of quantities, we can expose how state governments, managerial strata and political elites achieve socially stratifying political objectives that actually frustrate the kind of market‐rule for which rankings have been hitherto legitimised among the public. The insight here is that rankings make of audit techniques neither simply a market proxy, nor merely the basis for bureaucratic managerialism, but a social technology or ‘apparatus’ () that simultaneously substitutes and frustrates market operations in favour of a more acutely stratified social order. This quality to the operation of rankings can then be connected to the chronic accumulation crisis that is the neoliberal regime of political economy, and to the growing political appetite therein for power‐knowledge techniques propitious for oligarchy formation and accumulation‐by‐dispossession in the kind of low‐growth and zero‐sum environment typical in real terms to societies dominated by financialisation. A dialectical approach to rankings is suggested, so that a more effective engagement with their internal and practical contradictions can be realised in a way that belies the market‐myths of neoliberal theory.

The United Kingdom’s ‘hostile environment for immigrants’ is having distressing effects on people of African Caribbean heritage, especially those who have been threatened with deportation. While some research demonstrates a strong connection between the threat of deportation (deportability) and abjection, deportable migrants may also develop strategies (e.g. religious participation) to work around state controls. Jamaican family relations and spiritual practices emphasise intersubjectivity. This paper presents intersubjective ethnographic work conducted with a (formerly) deportable research partner, among Jamaican‐born Rastafari men who migrated to the UK in the 1990s as young adults. Restrictions against working during deportation appeals leave Rastafari men with the options of idleness, odd jobs in the informal economy or crime (typically selling drugs). Rastafari men find the discipline required to survive deportability through spirituality and engage in a variety of bodily rituals to generate positive energies, which help them remain calm and healthy. Vigilant attention to manners and dress are essential to raising social (and financial) capital on the road. The case of Rastafari migrants in the UK reveals a need for further expansion of ethnographic research into hostile environments from intersubjective perspectives that explore spirituality and deportability in diaspora families.

The idea that road safety could be secured using sound – particularly talkback radio and music – is fascinating. This paper explores Ford’s recent and unprecedented level of investment in car stereos in its 2018 models alongside the terrifying 2014 anti‐speeding commercial produced by the Northern Ireland Department of Environment (Road Safety). The commercial makes use of one musical track styled in two different ways to sonically represent safety and danger. Ford’s use of sound to create a feeling of safety for the driver, and the Department of Environment’s use of particular qualities of musical sound to craft ideals of safe and dangerous driving raise interesting questions: what is the relationship of sound to road safety? Why are specific qualities of sound related to safety and others to danger? I argue that conferral of safety (actual or fantastical) involves letting the dangerous world outside the car inside – even though we might think of safety as something we assure for ourselves by sealing out the external world, exercising control over it from our dashboards. I argue too that most explanations of why some qualities of sound assure safety obscure the workings of post‐Fordist regulation that is so ‘natural’ its power goes unnoticed.

Digital labour scholars have produced insightful analyses of the unpaid, creative, affective labour performed by users on social media platforms. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the hidden labour of content moderators: underpaid, contingent workers who enable the sanitised online spaces that users take for granted by removing disturbing content. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with third‐party Facebook content moderators in the USA and Ireland, I argue that the case of content moderation affords us a new way of putting these approaches into conversation with one another. Specifically, I illustrate how content moderators perform affective labour – for themselves and for the platform – in ways that make possible the monetisation of users’ cultural activities. In doing so, I draw attention to the human costs of maintaining user ‘safety’ and thus the profitability of large social media platforms.

This article explores the relationships between the body, gendered dispossession and agency under conditions of austerity in Portugal. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in a Portuguese post‐industrial town, this article focuses on the examination of how concrete physical experiences and social anxieties framed working‐class women’s experiences and explanations of the austerity‐led crisis of social reproduction and the ways through which the body was mobilised as a metaphor to make sense of forced and disruptive reconfigurations of the means of livelihood reproduction. It examines how working‐class women resorted to embodied practices, knowledges and moralities as a way of fulfilling provisioning pursuits, to assert rights, entitlements and aspirations. Throughout this article, women’s bodily experiences and embodied practices, knowledges and moralities are the main point of entry from which to reflect on the gendered, contested and negotiated nature of the austerity economic and political project. This article argues for the relevance of addressing the mobilisation of historically embodied legacies of gendered and classed dispossession in the making of ‘actually existing austerity’.

This review article surveys all of the articles published in the major Anglophone European social anthropology journals in 2020. Taking a perspective from Joel Robbins’ theorising of ‘the anthropology of the good’ as a critique of the primacy of ‘dark anthropology’, it highlights the rich range of ethnography and analysis recently produced. Focusing on the continuing interest in ontology, environment, relations and the problems inherent in anthropological comparison, the review article identifies how – during the crisis of the COVID‐19 pandemic – the discipline has continued to respond with vigour and resilience. An ongoing resurgence of the anthropology of religion is noted, as is the emergence of powerful emic exploration of such global phenomena as care, debt and corporate capitalism. The review article concludes with a reflection on the ideological and epistemological challenges social anthropology continues to face, both in the academy and more widely.

Editorial