Social Anthropology

Food waste is embroiled in a wide array of social efforts and actions in the contemporary EU. This article considers one site in the EU's capital where surplus supermarket food that is no longer sellable but is still edible is being used to fuel a job training programme. It argues that, rather than understanding the state's role in this process as a purely neoliberal tactic or as a capitalist profit-driven action, the repurposing of discarded food in order to create job opportunities and feed new populations has moral contours and enables specific forms of care.

This article examines self-referential humour in narrative accounts about experiences of conflict and community division, based on fieldwork undertaken in an interface area in Belfast in the late 2000s and in the 2010s. It has been a classic approach within anthropological studies of humour and jokes to focus on their socially or politically subversive nature. Some anthropologists, however, have viewed this approach sceptically, pointing out the Janus-faced nature of laughter that can turn against the weak, or the ambiguity that humour carries. Sharing the understanding that ambivalence and ambiguity are humour's intrinsic features, this article argues that these very features make humour crucial to people's everyday recollections and interactions in a post-conflict, still-much divided, society. Self-comicalisation helps people produce distance, either from themselves or the social group to which they belong, and direct attention to the absurdity of daily life under a long-term conflict in which mundane, day-to-day concerns and intense violence and suffering all flow in parallel. Jokes and comical storytelling capture this plurality of everyday life, which can be shared across the community division. Through attempting to sound out what could and could not be joked about, moreover, people seek out possible interactions in unfamiliar and uncertain relationships.

In July 2022, at the EASA meetings in Belfast, we passed the baton to a new editorial team comprising Chief Editors Dimitra Kofti (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens) and Isabelle Rivoal (University of Paris, Nanterre) as well as Assistant Editor Ville Laakkonen (Tampere University) and Book Review Editor Arne Harms (Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology). The new team has started to process new submissions and will introduce itself in one of the first editorials of 2023. We look forward to their contribution to this distinguished journal and wish them a felicitous term of office.

In recent (post-)conflict scenarios, the diversity and complexity of mass violence, including acts of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial or summary executions, have transformed how knowledge about such crimes is performed and produced socially. In inquiries into human rights violations, the search for, exhumation and identification of missing bodies often buried in mass graves have led distinct applications of forensic work to emerge. These have some differences from traditional crime scene investigation approaches. Novel interactions between forensic science practitioners and the communities where they operate have given place to unprecedented sociocultural, affective and scientific understandings of evidencing mass crimes. Drawing on different ethnographic experiences of unearthing human remains around the world, this collection considers how, in its judicial but also its extrajudicial application, forensic expertise has been transformed in connection to other epistemologies, collective and individual mourning, kinship, memory and a new politics and ethics of care in distinct state- and civil society-led pursuits to account for the dead and missing.