Social Anthropology

A growing concern about academic freedoms has recently resulted in the EASA General Assembly's December 2023 vote on a Motion to Create a Working Group on Human Rights and Academic Freedom, followed in February 2024 by the EASA executive's letter expressing direct concern after Professor Ghassan Hage's working relationship with the Max Planck Institute was terminated after misplaced accusations of racism and antisemitism. It is timely that the current issue opens up a space to discuss ethics, commitment, critique, authorship and truth seeking.

How do people discern between truth and untruth? What characterises their engagements with evidence? Some progress in answering these huge questions can be made by exploring them in conditions of radical epistemic uncertainty, such as the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the virus's behaviour was largely unknown and the efficacy of interventions unknowable. This article focuses on the workings of suspicion and its relationship with evidence, doing so by analysing conversations collected in a Facebook discussion group devoted to ‘Covid truth’. It argues that suspicion produces its own forms of falsification but has a contentious relationship with positive truth. By outlining the epistemic labour of self-avowed truth seekers, the article elucidates some of the mechanisms by which Covid conspiracy theories proliferated and explains why its partakers were convinced that they had a critical edge over the rest of us.

Despite repeated calls for change, social and cultural anthropology is still dominated by single-authored works. I consider two thought experiments that might disturb the status quo in interesting ways. Anthropologists could publish anonymously, treating ourselves in the same way as we treat our anonymised informants, for example, using pseudonyms. Alternatively, we could treat our colleagues in the field not only as equals but also as co-authors. Both these options have implications concerning the ‘dividual’ author (perhaps now thought of as an ‘auth’), and involve rethinking the ‘hau’ of publication.

I argue that the standard model of research ethics pushes the ethnographer of bureaucracies to the cautious, concise and compliant textual practices styles of the bureaucracy itself. Given the methodological importance of writing to ethnography, this matters. To make the argument, I draw on my experience of my decision to embargo my PhD thesis, an ethnography of an international donor agency. I show how the key gatekeeper to my research sought to translate concepts from research ethics (consent, avoidance of harm) into insisting on writing and stylistic practices familiar to his organisation (scope of work, risk), in order to constrain future academic publications. These dilemmas played out in the text of the thesis, its styles, forms and arguments. In studying up, the ethical demands of writing present challenges to the text and its methodological significance. I suggest that navigating these methodological challenges demand strategies that also start with the text.

State securitisation and internment programmes in Xinjiang have, since 2017, rapidly changed living conditions for its inhabitants and created new degrees of risk. Here, I consider whether the consent given by participants for my use of interview transcripts and other research materials is meaningful when it is no longer safe to contact participants, and their consent was given under very different circumstances. I argue that at such critical moments neither formal codes of ethics nor the ‘situated’ ethics of fieldwork offer helpful guidance, but that consideration of the internal good of anthropology, and insights offered by its practice, can provide potential answers.

Care, in lowland South America, is an ethical practice that is constitutive of kinship relations. Drawing on the case of the Warao, an indigenous people of Venezuela, I complicate this link between care and kinship in two interrelated ways: first, by focusing on the impossibility of perfect care (the particularising orientation of care makes neglect inevitable); and second, by acknowledging that kinship must not only be made, but also unmade. Both strands of this argument contribute to an effort to show that the dark side of the care/kinship nexus is relationally productive. Since kinship relations are constituted by the memory of past acts of care and nurture, quarrels that arise from reciprocal accusations of laziness and stinginess trigger dynamics of separation with long-term implications. Care is remembered but its limits are also acknowledged, especially at death, and such reflexivity contributes to its properly ethical character.

In this article I contribute to posthuman anthropology by developing two lines of thought. I first suggest that the post-Cartesian ontology integral to posthumanism accommodates a new scientifically informed version of negative theology. I then explore how this new negative theology implies a posthuman religion. By analysing Michel Serres's reconceptualisation of religion as the opposite of negligence and engaging with efforts to build on this thought by Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour, I develop a theory of posthuman religion I call religence. With the innovation of this term, I bring posthuman religion into view and, to show how religence may be approached anthropologically, I draw on Anna Tsing's ‘critical description’ of the interdependence between Tricholoma fungi and pine trees. Religence, I conclude, is best understood not as a single pervasive and unchanging mode of relating that can eliminate negligence, but as a plurality of provisional and shifting religence–negligence complexes.

Ghosh, Sahana. 2023. A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh–India Borderland. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 296 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-9573-2.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud and Shahram Khosravi (eds.) 2022. Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below. London: Pluto Press. 216 pp. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN: 978-0-7453- 4161-3.

Shih, Elena. 2023. Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 288 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 978-0-5203-7970-1.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2021. Subversive Archaism. Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 239 pp. Ppb.: $25.95. ISBN: 9781478017622.

Walter, Anna-Maria. 2021. Intimate Connections: Love and Marriage in Pakistan's High Mountains. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 244 pp. Pb.: US$37.95, ISBN: 9781978820487.

Segalen, Martine. 2022. Destins Français. Essai d'auto-ethnographie familiale. Paris: CREAPHIS Editions. 314 pp. Pb.: €12.00, ISBN: 9782354281823.

Lazarev, Egor. 2023. State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 321 pp. Hb.: £75.00, ISBN: 9781009245951.

Campbell, Stephen. 2022. Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 210 pp. Hb.: US$51.95, ISBN: 9781501764882.