Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 1. February 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 1 Front and back cover MEAT STILL ON THE MENU? Communities around the world are experiencing changes in the price and availability of animal products. In many places, meat, which was once eaten rarely, if ever, is now more readily accessible. In the top picture, a recently built international supermarket in the Guatemalan highlands stocks its shelves with packaged sandwich meat. The bottom image shows a meal served to mark a momentous occasion in the same community. Both of these images illustrate a change in dietary patterns that is manifesting in many regions of the world. Several international organizations, concerned about balancing the environmental costs of meat with human nutritional needs, have begun to address what they typically describe as ‘the increasing worldwide demand’ for meat. But how might we understand this narrative? What assumptions underpin these representations of demand? What are the implications of this kind of economic framing? In this issue, Emily Yates‐Doerr takes up the question of how anthropologists, with their attention to local contexts and realities, might add to discussions of global transitions. How might ethnographers engage with and respond to the representations of global trends employed by international institutions? What might these questions say about the discipline of anthropology's own engagement with questions of material needs and demands? The front cover shows how entomologists in Wageningen, The Netherlands, are responding to concerns about the ‘growing demand’ for livestock by working to cultivate edible insects, in this case mealworms, as ‘the next white meat’.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 2. April 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 2 Front cover GDP WORLD New York City's daily carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 as one‐tonne spheres visualized to engage the ‘person on the street’ (still from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtqSIplGXOA ). As the gross domestic product (GDP) turns 80 this year, it is time to reflect on the profound impact that this ‘almighty number’ has had on our societies. GDP drives not only our economies, but also our political social systems. Politicians are rewarded when GDP goes up and kicked out of office when it goes down. Democratically elected governments are bound to adhere to GDP‐friendly policies. As GDP has removed traditional issues of distribution and social justice from public debate by reducing the political economy to the ‘correct’ management of the business cycle, it has afforded unprecedented power to all sorts of technocrats, from central bankers to credit rating agencies. As it turns out, GDP has turned our societies into cages of consumerism, where the political notion of citizen has been largely replaced by that of consumer. But the convergence of contemporary crises, from climate change to the global economic downturn, opens new opportunities to contest the power of GDP. By looking at the economic, political and anthropological impacts of the GDP at work, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY intends to stimulate a cross‐disciplinary reflection on the type of society we live in. We begin in this issue with an exchange between Lorenzo Fioramonti and Jane Guyer on their respective takes on these indicators. Back cover OLDEST HUMAN FOOTPRINTS IN EUROPE? As the soft sediments of the East Anglian coast are eroded away, the underlying evidence of past human occupation is revealed. In Happisburgh, on the Norfolk coast, archaeologists have discovered tools and other evidence of early human activity as early as 800,000 years ago. Most recently, after a storm, a set of footprints were revealed in the silt of an extinct estuary. The footprints are thought to belong to a small group of adults and children, and have been dated between 780,000 and 1 million years old; this would make them the earliest known human footprints outside of Africa. Subsequent to being photographed, they were washed away by the sea. In this issue, Richard Irvine reflects on the significance of these findings for anthropologists engaged with environmental change. Encounters with the past shape how we understand time in coastal environments, allowing us to think beyond present day coastlines and imagine environments in flux. However, in a location such as Happisburgh, the impact of coastline changes are a source of major controversy, as the cliffs retreat by metres each year and the land under people's houses is swept away into the sea. Observing these processes of destruction and revelation at work, we sit at the intersection of long term variation and present‐day dilemmas.     

Indigeneity and the refusal of whiteness

Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.     

‘Touche pas à mon pain au chocolat!’ The theme of food in current French political discourses

Current French political discourses contain numerous references to food. The phenomenon began in the late 1990s with the issue of food safety and references to ‘la malbouffe’, as the population became increasingly anxious about the consequences of globalisation. In the 2010s the phenomenon gained momentum, particularly during the 2012 presidential elections as the debate focused on French identity and the place of Islam in France. Today, both the far right and the mainstream right include the issue of food in their discourses. Careful analysis suggests that the Identitaires, an electorally weak but ideologically influential political movement, were ahead of the tide before being followed by the Front National, which focused on the issue of halal meat, and finally other key figures from the former Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. This study highlights how the parties on the right appropriated the theme of food at different times and underscores similarities with regards to their frequent recourse to discursive strategies based on a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The topic of food therefore represents a new strand in the right’s and far right’s traditional discourses on immigration and identity and can be viewed as a new rhetorical tool to mark otherness.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 3. June 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 3 Front cover STANDSTILL Behzad Sarmadi tells the story of Dubai's descent into an economic crisis in 2009 by seizing on the financial concept of ‘standstill’. The government of Dubai publicly (and unilaterally) invoked this concept in late 2009 so as to pause the debt obligations of a ‘government‐related’ corporation in the face of immanent bankruptcy. This figurative use of standstill by the city‐state, however, soon manifested itself in the city. Cars once owned by over‐indebted foreign residents began to accumulate dust on the sides of roads and parking lots as they were abandoned to literally stand still. Sarmadi examines this process by repurposing the notion of standstill as a tool with which to ethnographically link the structural dimensions of a financial crisis and its lived experience. Back cover DISEASES OF THE SOUTH At night the chimneys of the Ilva steelworks loom behind a residential building in Taranto, southern Italy. The largest steelworks in Europe, and one of the few former state factories still standing in southern Italy, Ilva provides much needed employment in an impoverished region. However, it is also one of the worst polluters in Italy. Epidemiological studies have shown a high incidence of pulmonary cancers in the area, prompting Italian legal authorities to put the owners on trial for illegal polluting emissions. In spite of the unhealthy environment both in Taranto and in toxic waste‐ridden Terra dei fuochi, near Naples, the state's dominant message is for its residents to adopt ‘healthier lifestyles’. Biomedicine emphasizes individual, lifestyle‐linked factors of disease. Yet such an emphasis diminishes some of the most obvious underlying factors, such as pollution, over which individuals have little or no control, and which affects entire territories and populations. When a population is stigmatized or racialized as ‘backwards’, as southern Italians are, even the most obvious environmental injustices can be obfuscated in this way. In southern Italy, as in other areas hit by environmental injustice, marginality is compounded by a stigma that demonizes as irrational local environmental movements fighting pollution on their own doorstep. Effectively, people are blamed for aiding and abetting their own diseases. While the health‐or‐jobs dilemma is a classic issue of industrialization, companies have even more power to pollute once they are the only source of jobs left.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 5. October 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 5 Front cover FOOD STALL AT BRICK LANE MARKET Brick Lane is one of London's most iconic streets. Over the centuries, it has served as a refuge for Huguenots and east European Jews fleeing religious persecution, as well as Irish fleeing the famine. More recently, Bengalis, predominantly from the Sylhet area, moved to the UK because of political and economic instability at the time of Bangladesh's independence in 1971. Many settled along Brick Lane and its surrounding streets. Because of the lane's social, cultural, and economic importance to the Bangladeshi diaspora – it played a pivotal role in the renaming of the neighbourhood as Spitalfields and Banglatown in 2001, for example – some first-generation British Bangladeshis still say, ‘There are three Bengals: west Bengal, east Bengal, and Brick Lane’. Nonetheless, this inner-city area's working-class identity and employment patterns are threatened by super-gentrification in the housing, office development, and hotel and catering sectors. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are amplifying these trends. In this issue, Seán Carey looks at some of the trials and tribulations of the Bangladeshi community in and around Brick Lane. Back cover BANGLADESH IN BRICK LANE Street art on the shutters of a restaurant in Brick Lane.     

Destruction,mitigation, and reconciliation of cultural heritage

Attacks on built cultural heritage often occur during times of armed conflict. Many such acts are not collateral damage, but rather are deliberate and ideologically driven assaults intended to eradicate the adversary’s identity and collective memory. They represent ‘urbicide’ and ‘identicide’. The victims typically attempt to mitigate the loss, frequently by reconstructing the lost historic place and thereby restoring tangible evidence of their identity. Reconstruction, however, is itself an ideological act and a destructive activity, since it erases memories of the violence and removes physical evidence. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has commemorated several cultural heritage sites that have been destroyed and subsequently reconstructed, by inscribing them on the World Heritage List. Although this ensures the perpetuation of their memory, it may distort the original purpose of the list as a celebration of ‘outstanding universal value’. Beyond commemoration, a desired outcome is reconciliation. True reconciliation requires the release of anger and pain, so that memories of the violence may be retained without a desire for retribution. This article looks at a selection of acts intended at destroying cultural heritage, including some that did not occur during war, and examines means and motives for achieving mitigation and reconciliation.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 29, Number 4. August 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 4 Front cover Khat to be banned in the UK Yemeni man chewing khat. Khat is a herbal stimulant that has been chewed recreationally in the Arabian peninsula and in East Africa for centuries, but khat has recently become an object of concern in the UK after ‘khat pubs’, popular with Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian immigrants, have sprung up across the country. Against the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the UK government is following countries such as the USA, Canada, and Germany by banning khat. Later this year, the UK will treat khat as a class C drug, making it illegal to supply or possess. This July, the UK home secretary said ‘The decision to bring khat under control is finely balanced and takes into account the expert scientific advice and these broader concerns’. But in response to the government's announcement, Professor David Nutt (chair of the ACMD) retorted, saying ‘Banning khat shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’, specifically citing khat's ‘relatively low harms’ in his remonstration. In this issue, Ian McGonigle looks at the broader socio‐cultural background of khat in Africa and the Middle East, and analyzes the global khat controversy as a complex anthropological problem entangling development economics, public health management, domestic fears of terrorism, and khat‐mediated democratic formations. Back cover Scapegoating in Burma A 2013 calendar widely on sale inside Burma in the wake of Aung San Suu Kyi's landmark meeting with Barrack Obama in Rangoon, November 2012. Although the military retain majority control in parliament, media laws have been relaxed and limited reforms include a parliamentary role for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. Major violence erupted in May 2012 against the Rohingya, which was to spread to Muslims more generally by the time the two leaders met. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi remained mostly silent on the issue. Is this ‘hermit state’, the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia, situated at the intersection between Muslim and Buddhist Asia, and a gateway to India and China, succumbing to irrational fears enflamed by the US‐led war on terror? In this issue, Elliott Prasse‐Freeman argues that the Rohingya have become scapegoats for an ill‐defined sense of national identity. True, the Burmese army has also attacked many of the ethnic minorities wishing to retain autonomy, including major offensives against the Kachin and the Shan. But the kind of violence against Muslims is of a different kind. In anticipation of the last free elections in 1960 the army published Dhamma in danger (dhammantaraya) asserting the communist threat to Buddhism, hoping to win the elections. Today, such dangers are projected as coming from Muslim populations interpreted as not rightfully Burmese (the laws require proof of ancestor residence before wholesale immigration began with British conquest in 1823, yet written reference to ‘Rooinga’ occurred as early as 1799). In a country where fears reign, and with a monastic order not hierarchically controlled, many have fallen for this discourse in a way that the country will come to regret. Whither the saffron revolution and Aung San Suu Kyi's revolution of the spirit?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 4. August 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 4 Front cover: OLYMPIC LEGACY: FOOD Over the last decades, the Olympic Games have increasingly claimed to deliver a social and economic ‘legacy’ to the host city. The 2012 Olympic Games in London have set out to deliver a legacy of better food for east London, an area perceived as ‘deprived’, with higher than average rates of obesity and significant ‘food deserts’ in its midst. Various Olympic organizations have considered the issue, resulting in the publication of a Food vision for the first time ever in Olympic history. However, with companies such as Coca‐Cola and McDonald's having been appointed official suppliers to the Games, and with an extremely limited time frame, will the Games be able to deliver on this promise? Allotments have been demolished and plans are afoot for Queen's Market, Upton Park, to be replaced by a supermarket. In response, Queen's Market traders and customers protest that demolition of their market goes against the Olympic spirit. Indeed, the Games could be used instead to help improve access to London's ethnically diverse markets far beyond the borough limits, as suggested in this postcard distributed by campaigners. As Freek Janssens argues in his guest editorial in this issue, the 2012 Games provide the opportunity to more critically assess how food serves the marginalized in our ethnically diverse inner cities. Also in this issue, Johan Fischer deals with halal, another topic that impacts athletes and spectators at the Games, with sporting events taking place during ramadan. Back cover: POVERTY AND GRASSROOTS COMMERCE Aisha, a door‐to‐door entrepreneur in CARE Bangladesh’ s Rural Sales Programme (RSP), is one of 3,000 previously ‘destitute’ women who now earns an income by selling branded consumer goods across rural villages under a partnership between CARE and global multinationals such as Danone, Bic, and Unilever. Similar female distribution systems are now popping up across the world. From Procter and Gamble's distribution of sanitary pads to ‘poor’ adolescent girls in Kenya and Malawi, to Unilever's Shakti ammas distributing soap village‐to‐village in rural India, companies aim to expand their bottom line by fostering entrepreneurial opportunities among the poor through so‐called ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives. Such initiatives reflect the changing nature of international development where new development actors – celebrities, philanthrocapitalists, multinational corporations, social entrepreneurs etc. – spearhead efforts to reduce poverty, replacing the role long occupied by states and aid agencies. Today some of the world's largest corporations have become key players in global development by selling ‘socially beneficial’ products to the ‘poor’, and by drawing them into global commodity chains as entrepreneurs. These efforts are now widely endorsed as part of a pro‐market development agenda that looks to the perceived ‘efficiency’ of the private sector to do what billions of aid dollars have been unable to do. BoP distribution systems can offer ‘poor’ women like Aisha an opportunity to earn an income and contribute to the food security of their family. But these engagements pose risks as well as rewards, and raise pressing questions for anthropologists about how, under what terms, and with what effects, global capital is linking up with informal economies in the name of development.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 2. April 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 2 Front cover CHARLIE HEBDO SHOOTING On 11 January 2015, in the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo's offices and in a kosher supermarket, 4 million people took to the streets in France, including an estimated 1.5 million in Paris, many of them carrying the sign ‘Je suis Charlie’. The heart of the march in the capital was the Place de la République, where demonstrators climbed on the monument erected to Marianne, the national symbol of the Republic. In this issue, Didier Fassin discusses this unprecedented mobilization in defence of the ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity – as inscribed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – and more recently, laïcité, the French version of secularism inherited from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. He shows that this unanimity was, however, soon disrupted, as some, particularly those from low‐income neighbourhoods, questioned the double standard in the implementation of these principles – a contestation that was harshly repressed within the education and justice systems. To account for such dissonance, the article analyzes the discrepancy between the principles of the Republic and their applications in France. Laïcité, long implemented in a flexible and pragmatic manner, only became more strictly enforced in relation to Islam. Liberty, notably free speech, has recently been subjected to various legal and practical limitations. Equality, which exists under the law, is seriously undermined by social disparities and racial discrimination. Fraternity, which translates into solidarity and welfare, is increasingly weakened by discourses which stigmatize minorities. These discrepancies affect with particular intensity, immigrants from North and sub‐Saharan Africa and their descendants, most of them Muslims – a legacy of France's colonial past. Although they might seem untimely in such moments of unity, these meditations call for a critical reflection on the contradictions of contemporary democracies. Back cover AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL MANIFESTO Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa, the dominant ruling chief of the Fijian island of Bau 1829–1832 and 1837–1852, prior to the commencement of British colonial rule in 1874. Drawing by Alfred Thomas Agate. This is one of the earliest depictions of the rare black‐lipped pearl‐shell breast plates, civa. On Ratu Tanoa's head is the turban‐like bark cloth (masi) head scarf, i‐vauvau. It is said to have concealed the scar from a wound inflicted by a brother who was a rival for the title of Vunivalu, the war king of Bau: the active ruler in a diarchy whose counterpart was the sacerdotal king, the Roko Tui Bau. With Adi Savusavu, one of his nine wives, Ratu Tanoa was the father of Ratu Seru Cakobau, who succeeded in unifying most of Fiji into a single kingdom. In his anthropological manifesto in this issue, Marshall Sahlins argues that our main theories of ‘economic determinism’ represent a self‐consciousness of modern capitalist societies masquerading as the science of others. In the great majority of societies known to anthropology and history, power consists in the direct control of people, from which comes the ability to accumulate wealth, rather than control of their means of livelihood, of capital wealth, from which comes the control of people. Indeed in many cases the notion of ‘production’ itself would be inappropriate insofar as the ancestors or the gods are the creative agents, the fundamental sources of human subsistence – which people thus receive rather than make simply by their own labour. It follows that the principal political beneficiaries of economic prosperity are shamans, priests, garden magicians, chiefs, divine kings, and the like by virtue of their mediation of the spiritual origins of people's livelihoods. All this is not mere ‘false consciousness’ but the way these societies are organized: their own constituted anthropology, from which we must develop ours.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 2. April 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 2 Front cover NIGERIA'S IGBO JEWS Between images of the Star of David and menorah, Habakkuk Nwafor's front door in Nigeria's capital bears the proud notice, ‘I AM A JEW’. The leader of Abuja's Tikvat Israel Synagogue, Nwafor is an Igbo, a member of Nigeria's third largest ethnic group, numbering over 30 million people. Seated outside his Abuja home, he holds a copy of William Miles's Jews of Nigeria: An Afro‐Judaic odyssey (2013), a book about Nwafor's family and religious community. On its cover is a photograph of his son becoming a bar mitzvah. For at least a decade prior to its publication, Igbo Jews offered their own written religio‐historical narratives, but Miles's was the first book about Igbo Jewry composed by a Western academic. From 2,000 and 5,000 people, most of whom are Igbo, practice Judaism throughout Nigeria, though a much larger number self‐identify as Jews even while practising Christianity. Igbo self‐identification with and as Jews dates back to the 18th century, but concretized during and after the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), in which at least one million Igbo died in the failed bid for Biafran independence. The civil war and its disastrous consequences initiated a still‐ongoing period of intense questioning among the Igbo concerning their history, present predicaments, and future prospects. Igbo Jewish identity presents a challenge. Igbo Jews consider themselves part of world Jewry, but are not yet integrated with, nor represented in and by, Jewish institutions/associations around the world. Igbo Jewish identity also poses the truth question, as Igbo oral religio‐historical claims are examined and questioned by researchers and scholars using academic lenses. Back cover Lesbos in the frontline An olive branch with one hand outstretched in aid of a fellow human being, as drawn by illustrator Georgie McAusland. In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a tiny, sleepy fishing village and tourist idyll on the island of Lesbos, Greece, became a gateway to Europe for more than 200,000 refugees. In this issue, Evthymios Papataxiarchis analyzes how the European refugee crisis impacted his fieldwork site. The rescue of refugees involves several theatres of operation, ranging from the frontline centred upon the sea and the beach, to backstage revolving around the reception centres further inland. This attracts a multitude of volunteers, activists and humanitarian organizations from all over the world, becoming a focal point for world media. A swirl of political, ethical, and material elements, both local and transnational, now focuses upon the locality. The massive welcoming of reugees, however, is full of contradictions. With diverse actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies, what might appear from the outside to be a humanitarian act, is in fact more complex. Humanitarian structures raise several issues, such as local concerns about sovereignty, the authenticity of ‘disinterested’ motives, the nature of ‘solidarity’ and the role of the NGOs. From the local perspective this is a ‘generative moment’: at the centre of huge human and material flows, the local community is falling apart whilst to the incoming it represents freedom. Skala has become a mini theatre of conflicts that echo wider debates on the political future of Europe. In this capacity it captures a decisive moment in 21st‐century European history.     

Carbon Nullius and Racial Rule: Race,Nature and the Cultural Politics of Forest Carbon in Canada

Abstract: Critical geographers have paid remarkably scant attention to issues of climate change, even less so to forest carbon management policy. Building on geographic debate concerning the ontological production of nature and race, this paper argues that at stake in the climate change debate are not simply questions of energy geopolitics or green production. Also at issue in the climate debate are powerful questions of identity, the national form and race. This paper considers how a particular slice of the climate debate – forest carbon management discourse pertaining to Canada's boreal forest – enacts a political geography of racial difference, one that seeks to accommodate an imagined mode of traditional aboriginal life to the exigencies of global climate change mitigation and, importantly, to a logic of global capital now well into its ecological phase.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 1. February 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 1 Front cover ALTERNATIVE FACTS In response to discourses of alternative facts, denials of climate science and the undermining of science in the public sphere, on 22 April 2017, protestors marched for science in cities across the United States. In this image of the San Francisco march, a protestor holds a sign proclaiming ‘science is universal’. While some protestors' slogans assumed the objectivity of science and facts, others asserted the importance of diversity, equality and inclusion in science. Scholars of science and technology studies have long deconstructed claims of universality, but recently some have argued that the authority of science and facts must be reclaimed. Bruno Latour emphasizes that it is untenable to talk about scientific facts as though their rightness alone will be persuasive. Analyses of human rights and political violence disclose how narratives and propaganda shape not just individual attitudes but also the functioning of institutions. Contexts of gaslighting, repetition, distraction and undermining facts require different strategies for understanding how institutions and societies are perpetrating and perpetuating injustices. In this issue, Drexler's article develops a framework of multidimensional and intersectional justice for analyzing the layered, compounded, dynamic forms of power and inequality that contribute to particular injustices. Understanding justice as multidimensional and intersectional is part of a struggle from which new forms of knowledge and truth can emerge. Back cover ‘NEW SCHISM’ IN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY? A supplicatory prayer service (Moleben) to Saint Emperor Nikolay II in an Orthodox church in the Russian Federation. On the commemoration day of his death, believers line up to venerate large icons of the tsar installed in the church, as in many other churches of the ‘Russian world’. When kissing the holy icons and listening to the words of prayer, they participate in a theopolitical performance of belonging to a community of co-believers and compatriots, of people who share the same faith and the same nation, an enactment of the model ‘one state, one church’ prevalent in Eastern Orthodoxy. What happens, however, when state borders change, when new sovereign states emerge or become stronger? Is it possible for Orthodox Christians to practise their faith outside the national-territorial logic? Since the summer of 2018, Jeanne Kormina and Vlad Naumescu have been observing a rapidly developing cold war within Orthodox Christianity. This war between different claims for sovereignty and jurisdiction over ‘canonical territories’ has followed clear logics of religious nationalism and imperialism. In this conflict, the less privileged — ordinary believers and local religious communities — have suffered most. In this issue, Kormina and Naumescu analyze the recent ‘schism’ in Eastern Orthodoxy to show how religion and politics are strongly intertwined in disputes over territory and sovereignty. Drawing a parallel between the post-socialist revival of religion in Ukraine and the current mobilization on the ground, they show how the theopolitics of ‘communion’ and ‘canonical territory’ shape the fate of people, churches and states.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 5. October 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 5 Front cover This installation was part of the ‘Hurray Menstruation’ protest organized by gender activists during the Sabarimala pilgrimage of 2018–19. This protest was supported by the Kerala government as part of its ‘Renaissance’ campaign against the BJP’ s (Bharatiya Janata Party) provocative assertion of traditional Hindu values. The installation is a condensed symbol in Victor Turner's sense, with many layers of meaning. The major elements are a vulva, alongside an image of the Constitution of India, centrally mediated by a woman blowing a trumpet - an expression of freedom from repressive and oppressive moral values espoused by the dominant middle class. The installation draws attention to oppressive rules in Hindu religiosity and ritual practice that target women as polluting due to biological processes particular to them. By contrast, the installation attributes positive values to these ‘polluting’ processes instead. Back cover THE PARABLE OF THE FOOTBRIDGE A footbridge in the wetlands. Where will it lead? ‘The between’ is a powerful theme in ritual and mythical traditions the world over. However, different traditions will express ‘the between’ in different ways. As described by Paul Stoller in this issue, Sufi traditions hold the bridge as a major symbol for barzakh, a space that links two distinct domains - a place that is between things, a space that separates the known from the unknown, the comprehensible from the incomprehensible, a nebulous space that compels the imagination. The footbridge is the epitome of ‘the between’, of being neither here nor there, of being liminal. On the footbridge, you may not know your front from your back or your past from your present. In this neither space, uncertainty seeps into your being. Where will your steps take you? If you make it to the other side, will things be different? Will you be the same person? The existential crisis of ‘the between’ that one finds on the footbridge can bring disruption, turbulence and stress. Amid this risky and unstable state of ‘negative capability’, the mind is sometimes cleared of clutter as one enters a space of imagination, creativity, innovation and invention. Are contemporary anthropologists ready to risk disruption and invention so we can follow the sinuous path to the anthropological future? If we move forward, what will we find on the other side of the footbridge?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 6. December 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 6 Front cover AI and humanity A statue by Stephen Kettle of Alan Turing, sitting pensively at one of his code‐breaking machines in Bletchley Park. Made up from half a million pieces of Welsh slate, this statue was a landmark feature for the Life and Works of Alan Turing exhibition in 2012, which was curated following a public campaign to save the Turing‐Newman Collaboration Collection, a rare collection of his mathematical papers. Members of the Turing family additionally contributed some of the mathematician's personal belongings, including a teddy bear he used to practise his lectures on. Bletchley Park is now a huge heritage attraction, more so since The Imitation Game, a film based on the life of the pioneering computer scientist, came out. Previously known as the UK Government Code and Cypher School, this is now a site for the National Museum of Computing, which ncludes the huts and blocks that hosted a group of codebreakers whose work is said to have helped shorten the war by two years. In this issue, Ting Guo looks at Turing's personal trajectory in life and asks to what extent his search for artificial intelligence was inspired by considerations other than purely technical ones. To design artificial intelligence is to reproduce what is the essential ‘us’, what Pamela McCorduck refers to as an ‘odd form of self‐reproduction’. The desire for such machines, she argues, is a desire equally rooted in fear and allure, which reflects not only the drive for knowledge and human progress, but the discovery of the human self, which is itself driven by fundamental problems of being human. Back cover WORLDS IN MINIATURE Miniature worlds fascinate us. Taking familiar objects, scenes and environments and scaling them down to the minute generates a sense of wonder, forming a special connection between object and audience across which information can flow in subtle and unexpected ways. For centuries, people have used miniaturization to create tiny settlements with streets down which traffic doesn't flow and shops where no purchases are made. In doing so, they generate a fantasy, an idealized portrayal of a world they wish to see, not the one they inhabit. One of the most famous of these miniature communities is Madurodam in the Netherlands. Attracting more than 700,000 visitors a year, this park seeks to replicate particular dioramas of Dutch life, employing a dedicated team of professional modellers focusing on specific aspects of Dutch architecture and urban environments to portray a particular, explicitly positive, image of the Netherlands. The choices made at this site, and others like it all over the world, are part of a complex process of representation in miniature, a selection of iconography and design intentionally assembled to create unconscious impressions in visiting tourists, particularly children, about the full‐sized communities they resemble. As such, their representative powers are partial, a carefully curated miniature snapshot of certain aspects of an entire nation designed to act as a cultural and educational ambassador. In this issue, Jack Davy explores how the process of miniaturization, as evidenced by a Lego figurine, can encapsulate and transmit complex and controversial themes in a child‐like, non‐threatening manner. These processes operate subtly and inexplicitly, shaping our understanding of the wider world around us through the affordances of the small.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 5. October 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 5 Front cover THE CRISIS IN MALI. Malian refugees are seen at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritanian, Mbera, Mauritania, 17 July 2012. At that point, roughly 92,000 refugees had arrived in the camp. Estimates are that nearly half a million Malians have been displaced from their homes this year with many refugees having also fled to Burkina Faso and Niger. Photo taken by award‐winning photographer, Lynsey Addario ( http://www.lynseyaddario.com ). Back cover TOURISM: WORK VS LEISURE A tourist from Hong Kong photographs a young Mursi woman with lip‐plate in her lower lip. Tourists queue up orderly for each to take their turn photographing the wonders of Mursi culture. The image demonstrates the complexity of tourist encounters, and the multifaceted aspects of leisure and work. The Mursi prepare for their visitors well ahead of touring cars arriving at their settlements. They make themselves up and imitate the kinds of working activities (e.g. grinding) they know from experience will fascinate and elicit a response from tourists. Tourists typically ask the Mursi for permission to photograph the process and, occasionally, join in themselves with the Mursi in their ‘work’. In this sense, the Mursi imitate ‘traditional’ sociality as they simulate their own working activities for tourists who supposedly spend their leisure time in Mursiland. As Tamàs Règi argues in this issue, instead of seeing leisure as a fixed human condition within one society, anthropologists might approach it, rather, as a process that evolves at the interface between different societies that meet. In this way, leisure is a constantly developing practice in cross‐cultural encounters.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 1. February 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 1 Front Cover Anthropologists have long ignored or criticized mainstream popular culture, so we have not always realized that something as seemingly mundane as a Hollywood film could contain valuable insights for teaching and thinking about the issues that matter to an anthropological perspective on the contemporary world. Given science fiction's intersections with anthropology in using other ‘worlds’ to gain perspective on our own, science fiction films could be particularly good resources for engaging wider audiences with anthropological insights. While there have been occasional examples of such cross‐fertilizations, such as the writings of Ursula Le Guin, the potential of science fiction as a source for anthropological thinking has been by and large neglected. In this issue, David Sutton shows how the recent film Arrival provides one striking example of the overlap between science fiction, anthropology and popular culture. Films such as this, offer much food for thought and for engagement with anthropological understandings of topics ranging from linguistic relativity to culturally constructed temporalities. At a time when anthropology itself has gained increased visibility in popular culture, it behoves us to think through, rather than reject out of hand, the ways that we might highlight these increased opportunities to promote anthropological understandings. Back Cover: ‘WE ARE ALL POLICE’ A scene from the taxi station at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, December 2016, after several deadly attacks against police and military members. Turkish flag stickers read as: ‘We are all police; we are all soldiers’. Scholars across disciplines have recently expanded state‐centred understandings of security (i.e. national security) by looking at the human and non‐human elements of security, including everything from food and ecological systems, to political economy, poverty and even everyday life itself. What kind of critical tools do we need to develop in order to understand our increasingly ‘securitized’ world infused with a growing (and increasingly repurposed) police force that includes both human and non‐human agents of policing? In this issue, Hayal Akarsu focuses on the technicalization of police violence through reform and the expansion of police power into unconventional domains. She shows how the very practice of reforming expands the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what such reforms are supposed to restrain. While her research remains contextualized within the specific histories of the Turkish police, it has relevance beyond Turkey, as many practices once considered as ‘harsh policing’ have increasingly enjoyed the support of the public in different parts of the world. In such a milieu, an ethnographically nuanced analysis can provide us with a more subtly attuned vantage point, enabling us to understand how technologies of security and policing with seemingly liberal genealogies like community policing or broad democratic police reform can coexist or be aligned with ‘non‐liberal’ and even authoritarian modalities of government.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 3. June 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 3 Front cover THE RITUAL PROCESS Victor Turner developed van Gennep's concept of liminality, the transitional moment in rites of passage, into an innovative approach to the study of ritual dynamics. He also put the concepts of liminality and communitas to work, so as to understand larger processes of sociopolitical and cultural transformation such as those he was living through in the late 1960s. He was particularly interested in the relation between moments of transition, with their communitarian forms of sociality, and how – paradoxically – they failed to endure, giving rise to new forms of hierarchy. The covers of this special issue present two men jumping across thresholds, signalling its focus on transition. The anticipation and dramatization of transition is a key facet of the routinized ritual life of the Enawenê-nawê, portrayed on the front cover, who live in southern Amazonia, Brazil. While most Enawenê-nawê men are away fishing during the ritual season of Yankwa, hosts anticipate their return by performing a daily spectacle, ending with dramatic jumps into the flute house. During this time of mounting expectation, hosts adorn their bodies with particular care and their rousing performances cater to women and children who watch the spectacle from the dwellings that surround the open central arena. While circling the arena to elicit the fishermen's long-awaited return, the hosts play chaotic and ludic flutes – known as ‘pets’ to the civilized melodic flutes – and take on their character. In this issue, Chloe Nahum-Claudel argues that the Enawenê-nawê have achieved permanent communitas – an egalitarian social structure – by living in a permanent state of transition. Back cover THE OLYMPIAN'S THREE BODIES Competitive sporting events have historically been a prime site of ritual. Indeed, many argue that sport itself is ritualistic in nature. The history of the Olympic Games demonstrates the complex way in which ritual relates to society and to the polity. The lighting of the Olympic flame and the Olympic torch relay are rituals that have been central to the Olympic Games since 1928 and 1936 respectively. Chinese gymnast Li Ning after running, suspended by wires, around the upper rim of the Bird's Nest National Stadium and flying up to light the cauldron with the Olympic flame, the apical act of the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony on 8 August 2008. As an individual body, Li won three gold, two silver and one bronze medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, nearly 20 per cent of those attained by the national body of China as it re-entered the Summer Games after a 32-year absence. By 2008, Li was a national icon as well for his economic success under ‘reform and opening up’. Now heroic ritual custodianship of the Olympics' most sacred symbol of common humanity was added to his Olympian's status as a human body. Dramatic demonstration of the potential compatibility of Individuality, Nationality and Humanity is at the heart of Olympic ideology and ritual practice and the global attention paid to them. In this issue, John J. MacAloon analyzes the familiar Olympic victory ceremony and its infrequent alterations, such as the reversal in 2002 from gold-silver-bronze to the bronze-silver-gold medal presentation sequencing we know today.     

Language as a public good and national identity: Scotland's competing heritage languages

The preservation of one or several historically and culturally important languages may be a salient political issue in some polities. Although they may not be used as an active means of communication, these languages can also serve a symbolic identitary function. These ‘heritage’ languages can be seen as ‘public goods’ and that even non‐speakers of these languages can have opinions regarding their importance to national identity. In the Scotland example, while Gaelic has been the focus of proactive government legislation and education initiatives, Scots is still struggling for status as a recognised language. Both languages are in some way constituent parts of Scottish identity that at times may seem in competition with one another. Using original survey data, we delve deeper into questions of language, identity and politics in Scotland. First, we describe how public opinion is divided over the importance of Gaelic and Scots to Scottish identity. Second, we use attitudes towards these languages as a dependent variable looking at Scottish identity and attachment. Finally, we use these attitudes towards Gaelic and Scots as an independent variable in models for party identification in Scotland.