Social Anthropology

In a time of escalating environmental, political and social crises, Anthropology has transformative potential yet faces existential threats. This article argues for a regenerative Anthropology – one that not only critiques the colonial-capitalist systems driving breakdown, but also actively contributes to alternative, life-affirming futures. Drawing on insights from regenerative agriculture, activism and multispecies ethnography, we explore how Anthropology can support transformations towards more sustainable futures by reviving diverse knowledges, practices and ways of being. At the same time, Anthropology itself must evolve. As universities undergo neoliberal restructuring and departments shrink, we propose a fuller shift towards engagement and accessibility, and a pedagogy that balances critique with practice, and imagination with action. In an era of upheaval, Anthropology can – and must – become a force for regeneration, both within and beyond the academy.

Cultural cosmologies about land depict it as a generative material of propagating life. This regards its mechanism to influence life processes, including generation and regeneration – aspects that embody human growth and well-being. For the Luo of western Kenya, those aspects of life propagation are negated by another reality that ‘land is a witch’ – it can degenerate human vitalities. The degeneration occurs through an agentive potency activated through eco-immoralities occasioned by human and nonhuman entities. The article explores the agentive potency of land and its aspect to permeate the human body and alter its performance and status. It contributes to the anthropology of elemental thinking by revealing the land's potency, which enables it to act on its own right and affect life.

This article explores class precarity among male heavy industrial shopfloor workers in northern Vietnam. It brings Vietnamese understandings of crisis into a dialogue with the anthropology of crisis, arguing a crisis framework offers a helpful analytical entry to exploring gendered class precarity. Striving to provide quality healthcare and education for their children in Vietnam's ‘socialist-oriented market economy’, men working in global industry are reconceptualising stereotypical images of the masculine male factory worker and the role of fathers. As they aspire to become part of Vietnam's affluent middle class, low-income workers muster resilience to mitigate and cope with enduring financial challenges. Any added crisis not only fuels but also exacerbates an economic ‘latent crisis’ underpinning daily life, like a smouldering ember that could ignite at any time.

This article examines how forced displacement and international aid reshape local authority, focusing on the role of customary leaders in refugee-hosting areas. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyses how chiefs navigate increasingly plural governance landscapes shaped by state officials, aid organisations and refugee-led institutions. Mobilising the concept of polycephaly of power, the article argues that authority in displacement contexts is not eroded but rather reconfigured through negotiation and brokerage. Forced migration reveals both the resilience and the fragility of customary institutions, while aid interventions simultaneously reshape local hierarchies and reinforce state authority. Polycephaly constitutes a mode of governance shaped by symbolic capital, negotiation and overlapping claims to legitimacy. Forced displacement becomes a site of political reconfiguration where authority is enacted, contested and continuously reassembled.

This article explores charity and voluntarism in England's NHS during a period of ‘extended crisis’. Based on ethnographic research with an NHS charity, it examines how charitable organisations fulfil a dual role, by supplementing healthcare services and providing a ‘safety net’ to volunteers. Through the concept of ‘everyday pragmatism’, the article explains paid staff and volunteers’ motivations to improve present circumstances, while imagining a better future. The discussion contributes to wider debates about the reconfiguration of welfare states, suggesting that charity and voluntarism within the NHS are imperfect solutions that nonetheless genuinely seek to redress inequalities. Ultimately, everyday pragmatism describes people's motivations to act not only despite the circumstances, but in acknowledgement of them.

This article asks how freedom might serve as a comparative category for anthropology and proposes that we approach ‘freedom talk’ as an act of ideological demarcation or boundary making. Drawing on ethnographic research with conservative evangelicals in the UK and Unitarian Universalists in the United States, I show how both communities’ references to choice, liberty and autonomy work to cement group identity not only through a shared vision of the good, but through shared judgement of the bad. Freedom talk, then, is both an exercise of and fodder for collective judgement – a means of distinguishing oneself from socio-political Others.

Burger, Tim, Ushman Mahar, Pascale Schild and Anna-Maria Walter. 2024. The Multi-Sided Ethnographer. Living the Field beyond Research. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. 328 pp. Pb.: €52.00, ISBN: 978-3-8376-6677-9.

Schmidt, M. 2024. Migrants and Masculinity in High-Rise Nairobi: The Pressure of Being a Man in an African City. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. 184 pp. Pb: £22.99, ISBN: 978-1847013521.

Benezra, Amber. 2023. Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking With Microbes. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 256 pp. Pb.: US$25.00, ISBN: 978-1517901301.

O'Neill, Bruce. 2024. Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 272 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 978-1512825831.

Zamora Corona, Alonso. 2025. Entanglements of the Maya Universe: Life, Society and Cosmos among the K'ich'e of Momostenango. Berghahn Series: Ethnography, Theory, Experiment, Volume 11. Oxford: Berghahn Books. 226 pp. eBook: £19.95, eISBN: 978-1-6395-027-1.

Lamoreaux, Janelle. 2023. Infertile Environments. Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 160 pp. Pb.: US$23.95, ISBN: 978-1-4780-1933-6.

Yıldız, Emrah. 2024. Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 212 pp. Hb.: US$85.00/£71.00, ISBN: 978-0520379824.

Penfield, Amy. 2023. Predatory Economies: The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 248 pp. Pb.: US$29.95, ISBN: 978-1477327081.

Müller, Juliane. 2024. Embodying Exchange. Materiality, Morality and Global Commodity Chains in Andean Commerce. New York: Berghahn Books. 223 pp. Hb.: £104.00, ISBN: 978-1805392637.

Manfredi, Federica. 2024. Beyond Pain: The Anthropology of Body Suspensions. New York: Berghahn Books. 318 pp. Hb.: £104.00, ISBN: 978-1-80539-525-6.