Social Anthropology

As anthropologists well know, rhythms and cycles contain powerful and meaningful social processes. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale has been experiencing an important cycle in its life as an academic journal in the past two years after moving from Wiley to Berghahn as publisher and welcoming a new editorial team six months ago. It is time for the incoming team to express its gratefulness for the dedicated work accomplished by Lukas Ley, Nikolaï Ssorin-Chaikov, Lisa Pentaleri, and Jeanne Kormina, while writing the first editorial of the next cycle for SA/AS. We are delighted to walk the threshold with this issue placing a great emphasis on young researchers questioning the instable, unsteady and often contradictory fulcrums of the present world.

Through two significantly distinct ethnographic case studies, both based in Santiago, Chile, we argue for the need to attend to experiences which are not conceptualised by our interlocutors, or that remain ‘dark’ in terms of their ontological and representational properties. We point out that anthropology has been ill-equipped to deal with these ineffable margins, and point to conceptual arches which could be used transversally in what we call a ‘dark anthropology’. The two fields in question here are the ufological ‘absurd’ and early mothering experiences among low-income communities. What both have in common is that they defy anthropological figure-ground logics, where experiences are explained via their social contexts. We argue for an anthropology that can come to grips with non-linear, sometimes dark, socialities.

The so-called Iranian revolutionary youth's aspirations for martyrdom are not based merely on Islamist doctrines or Islamic ideologies. They readily place all fallen combatants in a ‘martyrdom box’, linking them to Islamic sacrality and claiming they feel martyrs via martyrs’ ghostly whispers. Through ethnographic journeys in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq, I unpack how they craft the ‘martyrdom box’ and communicate with the ghostly whispers. I argue that the Iranian revolutionary youth's perceptions of martyrdom and militant subjectivities emerge in relation to disbelieving histories that contest the state's narratives and their mystical relationships with martyrs. This article takes Iranian revolutionary youth as exemplars to explain how individuals implicated in political violence craft acts of ‘knowing’ and render death and dead ‘knowable’. In other words, instead of asking what is known, I proceed by unpacking how what is known becomes real and how the act of knowing contributes to the emergence of reality.

This article focuses on understandings of fog capture as an alternative water supply system in Lima. In neighbourhoods where state infrastructure is missing, fog catchers promise to alleviate residents’ dependency on private water suppliers. However, the utility of these micro-infrastructures is not self-evident. I show how a local NGO attempted to bring about commitment among prospective beneficiaries by framing the fog catchers against the size and incapacity of state infrastructure. In the NGO's rhetoric, the fog catchers’ limited scale vis-à-vis state infrastructure meant that they were better suited for addressing spaces that escaped state attention. Yet this also presented fog capture as a small-scale alternative that could be scaled up to respond to a problem of substantial ubiquity. The article concludes by suggesting that anthropologists’ uses of smallness as a trope for aggrandising their own methodological dispositions be repurposed for investigating the role of smallness in pursuits of macro effects.

In recent years the concept of performance (in the sense of effort) has come under criticism in Danish societal debates due to its dubious relation to increasingly widespread illnesses such as depression and stress. While acknowledging these potentially harmful consequences, we argue in this article that performance in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, yet it needs to unfold within a particular temporal logic in order to be both possible and not lead to stress. Based on empirical material from a professional handball club and an international software company, we show how immersion in the present moment and the immediate future enhances abilities to perform, and how anthropological studies of time open up for new ways of understanding high performance.

France re-established identity controls at its Italian border in 2015, leading ‘unauthorised’ migrants to cross the border by treading mountain trails at night. Mobility here occurs in low visibility. In this paper, I depart from sight as the preferred sense with which to grasp navigation and detection to explore the role listening plays in the making of alterity. Drawing from four months of fieldwork in the French–Italian borderland, I suggest in this article that unauthorised migrants are signalled as ‘sonic others’ by their attempt to remain silent. I also show that displacing alterity from the visual to the auditory makes room for creative mishearings: for identities to be forged in sound, and thus escape detection. As such, alterity may be more difficult to perceive by ear than by sight. Listening can reconfigure visual boundaries and invite us to wonder: what does difference sound like?

By attending to the conceptualisations of interfaith student and youth groups in Bandung, Indonesia, in response to state ideologies and regulatory policies, this article examines new approaches to the concept of pluralism – approaches that recognise the affective economies of how people construe and deal with difference. Conceptualisations of ‘authentic encounter’ not only pose a direct critique to the dividing effects of the legal codification and categorisation of difference – a critique that anthropologists working in societies characterised by ethnic and religious diversity voiced alongside feminist thinkers – but also reveal great potential for theoretical reflections from below. By drawing on contemporary anthropological work on pluralism in Southeast Asia and leaning on the anthropological literature on affect, this article shows how conceptualisations of ‘authentic encounter’, which circulate among groups of predominantly young activists, situate feelings and emotional states directly into ideas of how diversity should be dealt with. By doing so, they not only challenge the limits of pluralism as a politico-legal category but also espouse a concept of pluralism that is essentially embedded in the emotional life and social activities of those living with difference.

The world's ethos in 2021 grew increasingly realistic, focusing on constraints and practicalities, accounting for ‘bitter necessities’, and choosing defensiveness, preservation and stability over creation and exploration. The rise of realism in the world's public and private spheres presents a challenge to anthropology's ability to integrate a moral compass, empirical embeddedness and epistemological value in the discipline. This review of research published in some major peer-reviewed Anglophone European journals in 2021 seeks to vindicate the optimistic kind of moral realism by showing its inescapable entanglement in two of the most powerful items on anthropologists’ agendas today, the ontological and the future-oriented.

It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migration are increasingly becoming key topics in national elections.

Many thanks to Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for their response to my critique (Bråten 2022a) of their special section on ‘Utopian Confluences’ (especially, Blanes and Bertelsen 2021; Bertelsen 2021), and to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale for publishing the exchange. The theoretical questions that arise from our diverging stances are, hopefully, of general interest. While I take Blanes and Bertelsen (hereafter B&B) to argue an epistemologically all-inclusive irrealism, I favour an ontologically discerning realism. It is tempting to pursue the many theoretical entailments of this contrast further, but let me in this final reply comment on the character of the exchange itself: the kind of intellectual discourse that our diverging positions seem to foster. I believe B&B's response is illustrative of a ‘post-critical’ approach that recasts principles of scholarly debate in problematic ways. Addressing this issue allows me also to clarify a perplexity in their response: How could I possibly read their contributions as ‘irrealist’ and instances of a ‘migration out of academia’?

Pfeilstetter, Richard. 2022. The Anthropology of Entrepreneurship. Cultural History, Global Ethnographies, Theorizing Agency. New York: Routledge. 143 pp. Hb.: US$29.95/£25.00, ISBN: 9780367407483.

Elinoff, Eli. 2021. Citizen Designs. City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press. 310 pp. Hb.: US$80.00, ISBN-13: 9780824884598. Pb.: US$28.00, ISBN-13: 9780824888268.

Braukmann, Fabienne, Michaela Haug, Katja Metzmacher and Rosalie Stolz (eds.). 2020. Being a Parent in the Field: Implications and Challenges of Accompanied Fieldwork. Norman, OK: Transcript Press. 290 pp. Hb.: €45.00, ISBN: 9783837648317.