Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 3. June 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 3 Front cover Chagos Islands and WikiLeaks evidence in court All Souls' Day, St Georges cemetery, Les Salines, Port Louis, Mauritius, 2013. Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos Refugees Group, visits St Georges cemetery in Les Salines on the outskirts of the Mauritian capital Port Louis, to commemorate All Souls' Day, the Catholic day of prayer for the dead, when people also tend and lay flowers on the graves of deceased loved ones. For Olivier Bancoult, All Souls' Day has long been associated with the graves of numerous members of his immediate family who died in poverty in the aftermath of his family's relocation from the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. Now, All Souls' Day also involves the graves of Chagossian activists such as Lisette Talate, stalwart of the Chagos Refugees Group for nearly three decades from its establishment in 1983 until her death in 2012. For Chagossians, commemorating All Souls' Day outwith the Chagos Archipelago has a double poignancy. Firstly, many of those being remembered – including Lisette Talate – had been forcibly uprooted from Chagos and wanted nothing more than to be able to return to live, die, and be buried there. Secondly, mourners are reminded of the fact that Chagossians cannot routinely lay flowers on or tend the graves of ancestors who died and were buried on Chagos before the islands were depopulated, unless they are lucky enough to get a place on one of the small‐scale return visits organized annually by the UK government. In this issue, Laura Jeffery examines the nature of WikiLeaks evidence in one more Chagos Islander court case. Back cover RIGHT‐TO‐DIE Debbie Purdy and husband Omar Puente, outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, 2008. Debbie Purdy is one of a number of high profile right‐to‐die campaigners who have come to prominence in recent years through legal cases aimed at changing the law on assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia in the UK. Debbie has been living with multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative disease, since 1995. She wants to have the option of an assisted suicide should she end up suffering to the point that she no longer finds her life worth living. Debbie's lawyers and the campaigners who worked alongside them, used the law in an instrumental way, and were eventually successful in forcing legal concessions which the British parliamentary system had not seen fit to make. Debbie's case paved the way for that of Tony Nicklinson who, in 2012, also claimed a right‐to‐die as a response to his per‐manent and total paralysis – from ‘locked‐in' syndrome. Both Debbie and Tony have joined the pantheon of international right‐to‐die celebrities whose images have symbolic potency in the public imagination, and whose suffering becomes imbued with polit‐ical and moral meaning. In this issue, Naomi Richards discusses how right‐to‐die legal cases are presented to the public via the media and what this means in terms of both the right‐to‐die debate and media portrayals of death and dying more generally.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 38, Number 3. June 2022

Front and back cover caption, volume 38 issue 3 SPACE ANTHROPOLOGY A day on Mars, also known as a sol, lasts approximately 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds. In order to operate robotic rovers on the red planet, teams of scientists back on earth have to abandon terrestrial rhythms and work according to a new temporality: Mars time. This process is at the heart of Zara Mirmalek's Making time on Mars (2020) and is the inspiration for the front cover illustration by Uni Pang. This ethnography chronicles how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists and engineers forged new relationships with time, technology and each other in order to manage a novel multi-planetary work system. Mirmalek's work, and others like it, are part of the emerging field of space anthropology. While humanity's various relations with the cosmos have been a running thread throughout the discipline's history, contemporary developments, such as the rapid growth of the private space sector and the looming threat of climate change, have pushed celestial matters to the fore. Recent scholarship has examined the collaborative practices of technical experts working on deep space probes, has shed light on the continuing colonial legacies of spaceports around the world and has asked how indigenous ontologies and decolonial thought can challenge techno-scientific designs for unchecked human expansion into the stars. In this issue, members of the ARIES project — an international research team based at Jagiellonian University — draw on their experience designing and teaching an undergraduate course on the social science of outer space to discuss the current state of space-oriented research. Engaging with outer space poses distinct methodological and theoretical questions that complicate some of the most fundamental tenets of anthropology. Yet, approaching these issues is crucial for understanding many contemporary social, ecological and political matters across local, planetary and multi-planetary scales. ‘DRIVE AND TALK’ FIELDWORK In Langhorne Creek, South Australia, seasonal streams cut through a broad floodplain with giant eucalypts and grazing cows, interspersed with vineyards growing shiraz and cabernet sauvignon grapes. On this rich landscape, the descendants of settler-colonial families have farmed for almost two centuries, irrigating in part with floodwaters from the Angas and Bremer Rivers. These precious waters are collaboratively shared between farms through sluice gates and earthworks systems. In this issue, Georgina Drew, William Skinner and Douglas Bardsley reflect upon the importance of the ‘drive and talk’ for fieldwork in an agricultural landscape: not only to generate empirical data but also phenomenologically, as the farm is felt through the sand and gravel passing under the wheels, the scrubby bushes scraping the chassis, and the muddy embankments navigated by a driver who knows their land inside out. Farming is physical work that requires mobility. At the scale of an Australian farm, mobility involves driving. Ethnographic engagement then is not just mobility but also auto-mobility, as farmers bounce around their paddocks in pickup trucks with researchers in tow, driving between properties, fording streams, stopping here and there to point out pieces of historic infrastructure, examine vineyards, and explain the country and how it is changing. Water is front of mind in the region. In recent decades, groundwater depletion and rising salinity have represented an existential risk to Langhorne Creek, exacerbated by the major ‘Millennium Drought’. Now, a new pipeline drawing water from further afield provides increased surety. Yet, farmers maintain their vigilance, concerned about climatic fluctuations and changes to ground and surface water flows. By relating to farmer concerns in the intimate setting of the automobile, researchers can generate new understandings of the risks and opportunities for adaptation.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 3. June 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 3 Front cover Imagine you're walking in the woods and you kick over an artefact – a piece of pottery, perhaps. You don't know what it is, but you know it's old, and it looks precious. Who you gonna call? A university colleague? The British Museum? Or an ex‐army, former professional wrestler, whose trademark call is to arch his chest like a gorilla and shout, ‘Boom, baby, boom!’? American cable viewers have been watching Ric Savage seek out antiquities, dig them up and sell them. Savage, owner of an artefact recovery and sales outfit that specializes in the Civil War era, fronts American Digger, a filmed series broadcast by Spike TV. He's passionate about history, he knows about old things and he digs – the definition, you might think, of an archaeologist. Archaeologists beg to differ. Across the US, high profile archaeological organizations have complained about the series, which, they say, promotes looting and the destruction of national heritage. They seem to have gained support not just from the public, thousands of whom are signing online protests, but also from metal detectorists and collectors – members of the very gang to which Savage belongs. On 28 March American Digger Magazine, which has no connection with the TV series, dropped Savage as a columnist. Metal detectors, it said, are for finding history, not making money. For many archaeologists such a distinction misses the point. Whatever the intention, they argue, inexpert excavation driven by the beep of a machine is destructive. Yet in Britain, where communication between detectorists and professional archaeologists is enshrined in the unique Portable Antiquities Scheme, barriers have been coming down. It was looting that sparked the idea for the scheme 20 years ago. Could an outsize man with a penchant for heavy machinery achieve the same in the States? Back cover RECOVERING MEMORABILIA The front and back covers of this issue portray contrasting ways in which memorabilia may be recovered. If the front cover is about sensationalizing finds for entertainment on popular TV, the back cover shows finds after sifting for valuable possessions in the deposits left by the 3/11 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. Various volunteer centres were set up to help clean local residents' rescued possessions found in the debris. Photos and family albums were the most frequently rescued objects. In addition to ongoing cleaning sessions in the devastated region, off‐site sessions have also been held in various parts of Japan. Piles of rescued photos are still waiting to be cleaned. The image shows cleaned, rescued photographs being dried at a cleaning session held at 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo on 11 February 2012. Even though it has been a year since the tragic disaster, not all the images in the uncleaned photographs have faded despite having been covered in seawater and sludge full of bacteria and asbestos. Having survived as traces of memory as well as of personal history, these photos offer the hope of one day being reunited with their owners, or the relatives and friends they portray.     

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.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 3. June 2017

Front and back cover caption, volume 33 issue 3 Front cover Donald J. Trump being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, 20 January 2017. The wealthiest and the oldest US president, Trump has also proved to be the most divisive, picking controversial cabinet members, many of whom, like him, are millionaires or billionaires with no experience of working in the public sector. During early 2017, white nationalists became emboldened by his xenophobic rhetoric. In this issue, four authors pick up on select dimensions marking the Trump presidency, including: post‐truth, the trickster phenomenon, the role of big data in the US elections and Trump's pet project, namely the border wall between Mexico and the US. To what extent is Trump's rise to power indicative of global trends? In what ways have the shortcomings of neoliberalism accelerated these processes? How can anthropologists best position themselves within national environments where authoritarian, misogynistic and xenophobic tendencies are on the rise? Back cover: FOOD WASTE There are increasing levels of food poverty in the UK and ever‐growing numbers of food banks which have become symbolic of the state of the nation. At the same time, there is also rising public concern about food waste or surplus. Although the largest proportion is produced in the home, consumers tend to blame supermarkets, often utilizing a discourse of environmentalism. Such concern has resulted in a number of high‐profile campaigns like the one shown here ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’ by WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) – which is only one of a number targeting both the food industry and consumers. Recently, it has also been suggested that such surplus food should be given to the growing numbers of people in food poverty through charities which supply food to their clients, including (but not only) food banks. The recent introduction of the Food Cloud app in a partnership between FareShare and Tesco has facilitated such a process. Indeed, it is often contended that this is a win‐win situation which neatly solves both problems – too much food being produced and left unsold, and too many people who cannot afford to buy food. In this issue, Pat Caplan points to some of the problems in this apparently tidy solution, drawing on two case studies from her recent research. While those in food poverty receive donated food from the public via food banks or surplus food from companies, they recognize that the acceptance of such food, no matter how good its quality, is stigmatizing – left‐over food for left‐over people. On the other hand, the food industry benefits not only from the additional food purchased by consumers to donate to food banks, but also from the PR which accrues from donating its own surplus to charity. So the win‐win situation does not in the long term solve either the problem of production of surplus or the problem of poverty.     

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 29, Number 3. June 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 3 Front cover Oil palm plantations and surplus labour The photo shows old oil palms injected with roundup to kill them prior to replanting – operations that require very little labour. Indonesia already has ten million hectares of oil palm, most of it planted in massive, mono‐cropped, plantations eerily devoid of people, having obliterated the villages, farms and fruit trees that were there before. Market‐wise, oil palm is resilient. Its price goes up together with the price of oil since it can be used as a biofuel. We eat it (cooking oil, margarine, chocolate), bathe with it (soap), and put it on our lips (cosmetics). As food, the potential market in India and China is immense, and as a ‘biofuel’ it fills European Union mandates to replace fossil fuels with ‘renewable energy’ sources. The crop is rapidly blanketing the major islands of the Indonesian archipelago (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Papua), it is expanding in Latin America, and being re‐imported into Africa – its place of origin – as a large scale plantation crop. Resilience in terms of livelihoods is another matter. Corporate oil palm is a land‐gobbling, people‐dispelling machine. The Indonesian government promotes the crop as an engine of poverty reduction, but its focus is corporate profits. It previously obliged corporations to develop 80 percent of their concession area for smallholders, but the number now is reversed: 80 percent of the land can be used by the corporations. They treat smallholders as irritants to be swept out of the way, rather like mosquitoes. Industry promoters claim that one hectare of oil palm generates five jobs, but the actual number is one job per five hectares. The industry isn't highly mechanized, it just doesn't need many workers once the plantations are established. Oil palm is foreclosing options. It uses a lot of water, making it difficult to grow anything else nearby. We don't know what the land will be good for after oil palm, or how climate change will affect it. Committing massively to one crop under these conditions seems like a bad promise – an IOU no‐one should accept. But the risks aren't equally distributed. Most of us encounter palm oil as consumers. As Tania Murray Li argues in her guest editorial in this issue, its livelihood effects way up a river in Kalimantan are out of sight, out of mind. Back cover UNWANTED CHILDLESSNESS A young mother with her children in Bangladesh. Children are the raison d'être for couples in this densely populated country but women in particular. Involuntary childlessness tends to evoke pity but also condemnation and exclusion. What happens to people when no children are born to them? Sjaak van der Geest and Papreen Nahar sketch the social, emotional, and existential consequences of unwanted childlessness. Drawing on ethnographic work in Ghana and Bangladesh and on a British dystopian novel, they describe how childlessness leads to loneliness, sombreness and a sense of uselessness. Inspired by the work of psychologist John Kotre and philosopher Ernst Bloch they proceed to make sense of these experiences by linking them to the issue of continuity / discontinuity and what it is to be human. Life is future‐oriented. Children constitute and personify continuation, also after death. Without children the future is locked. Life is interrupted and loses its meaning. Through anthropological reflection on women's complaints and a novel about a future childless world, the authors search for a more profound understanding of what renewal of life means to human beings.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 3. June 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 3 Front cover PLASTIC POSSIBILITIES The front cover depicts an art installation by South Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, also known as ‘the plastic alchemist’, at the ‘Your Bright Future’ exhibition in Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 2009. For Hwa, plastic is the most artificial material that is at the same time the most common element in today's landscape. Hailed as the quintessential material for design, invention and relentless production, plastic is often associated with post-WWII industrial growth in the Western world. And yet, wading through the ‘plastic islands’ of our oceans, standing knee-deep in landfills, choking on incinerated plastic fumes, the spectacular ‘utopia’ of plastic is beginning to register differently. In this issue, Tridibesh Dey and Mike Michael present the everyday ‘alchemies’, the lived realities assembled with plastic and plastic waste in India. They take us into the household of Dey's parents in Kolkata and familiarize us with the creative repurposing techniques performed on everyday plastic items like bottles, containers, carrier bags, etc., which are supposed to be thrown away after ‘single use’. Like the recycled baskets in Hwa's art installation, the inventive deployment of used plastics here point to the emerging socio-materialities of plastics, which might, in turn, inform and inspire different futures, leading us into collaborative kinship and more-than-human living with plastics. These emergent plastic relations are embedded within more extensive socio-economic, political and ecological relations configured in contemporary India around plastic's production, consumption and waste management. The delicate plastic economies of the poorer urban households are at risk under the recent government reforms in waste management, the neo-liberalization of waste work and the ‘toxic’ externalities produced by large-scale extractive infrastructures. Back cover CONTAINER SHIPPING Above: satellite image of the containership Ever Given from the Evergreen Marine shipping line stuck in the Suez Canal, Egypt, 24 March 2021. Below: the same ship safely moored in the port of Rotterdam, 9 March 2020. The Ever Given, an ultra-large containership, obstructed the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, thereby accruing an estimated loss to the world economy of US $400 million per hour. Getting stuck in the canal on its way from Asia to Rotterdam, the ship not only brought the seemingly smooth flow of maritime transportation via this central waterway to a hold, but also sparked great public interest in the role of the maritime industry – and its ever-growing container vessels – in the functioning of global capitalism today. In ‘Politics of scale’ in this issue, Hege H⊘yer Leivestad and Elisabeth Schober remind us that the Ever Given is only one of many ultra-large ‘box ships’ sailing the world's oceans today. These vessels have, over recent years, undergone a spectacular growth in size. The reasons for this expansion are no longer primarily located in economies of scale, the authors argue, but rather, are enmeshed with complex political processes in far-flung places across the world. Featuring the story of the HMM Algeciras, currently the largest containership in the world in terms of container-carrying capacity, the article takes us from a ship christening at a South Korean shipyard, past the Suez Canal, to the Spanish port town that the ship is named after. Tracing the complex public-private partnership that brought the HMM Algeciras into being, attention is also paid to the mounting social costs of ultra-large container vessels like these, which require massive (and often public) investments in infrastructures at the land-sea interface. Bigger is not always better. In the containership industry, have we arrived at a point where unsustainable false economies of scale are setting in?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 36, Number 3. June 2020

Front and back cover caption, volume 36 issue 3 Front cover COVID-19 IN ITALY An elderly man steps outside, a bag in his hand and a mask covering his face. He stares at the wet pavement as he goes. He is wondering whether to take that onward step. His shadow on the wall magnifies his uncertainty. He is alone. It has been raining. The sun spells help. Maybe. Uncertainty and loneliness are among the emotions that we now associate with Covid-19. By 9 May, the death toll among those who had tested positive for the virus in Italy surpassed 30,000, the highest in Europe. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the paramount need has been to protect those in the most ‘vulnerable categories’, the aged and those with pre-existing conditions. Italy, as the country with the highest percentage of elderly people in Europe, has failed them. At the outbreak of the pandemic, the rushed and short-sighted resolution to transfer Covid-19 patients to nursing homes resulted in a massacre, whose scar will get deeper with time. Yet, how vital ‘the elderly’ are to society cannot be stressed enough, particularly when state family support policies are insufficient, a gap that grandparents have long been filling by taking care of their grandchildren. If uncertainty is ahead of us, so is the void left by all those ‘elderly’ men and women who will be deeply missed. In this issue, Manuela Pellegrino provides a narrative of her experience as an Italian doing fieldwork in Greece while the epidemic was in full swing. Back cover Covid-19 Rear Admiral Timothy Weber, commander of US Naval Medical Forces Pacific, speaks to members of the press moments before the hospital ship USNS Mercy departs from its base near San Diego, California, 23 March 2020. The vessel, which can host up to 1,200 medical personnel, is being deployed in support of US Covid-19 response efforts. It will serve as a referral hospital for up to a 1,000 non-Covid-19 patients should shore-based hospitals prove unable to adequately serve them. The Mercy's deployment illustrates how grave the situation has become in the US. It also reveals something about how, after decades of neglect, the country's public health infrastructures have come to rely heavily on support from military and corporate institutions. The pandemic brings to light a host of global issues, ranging from food scarcity and insecurity, mass unemployment and economic crisis, the crucial roles played by elderly people, the fate of education and schooling, the unplanned release of prisoners, the long-term consequences of ‘distancing’ directives and much more. Underlying all of these topics is a sobering observation made by medical anthropologists more than two decades ago: locally and globally, it is the poor who are most likely to contract – and die from – infectious diseases. In Salento and Silicon Valley, in Rio de Janeiro and Wuhan, the pattern has been strikingly similar – the most economically vulnerable members of society suffer disproportionately. Anthropology contributes to a fuller understanding of Covid-19 and its aftermath. Recent research has developed a more complete cross-cultural picture of recent epidemics like AIDS, SARS, Ebola and Zika. When combined with archaeological and biological knowledge of pandemics stretching back to the Black Death and earlier, the discipline adds critical historical and cross-cultural perspectives. Anthropologists have much to say about how and why communicable diseases emerge, the underlying social and environmental conditions that fuel them, and potential strategies for their effective mitigation.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 3. June 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 3 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ADVOCACY Insecurity is a major concern for mobile pastoralists in many regions of the world. In this issue, Mark Moritz and Paul Scholte discuss their involvement with mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, where insecurity has long been a major concern, with children commonly being kidnapped and held for ransom by heavily armed criminal gangs. Should anthropologists engage in advocacy in cases where the peoples they research suffer in this way? It may not immediately seem problematic to advocate for more security and safety for mobile pastoralists in this case. However, advocacy is not without its problems; acting on behalf of one's research subjects can have adverse consequences for others. Although many anthropologists feel a moral responsibility towards the people they work with, their engagement in advocacy is fundamentally different from that of human‐rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are committed to protecting human rights irrespective of cultural identities. By contrast, anthropologists are committed first and foremost to particular peoples, which brings ethical predicaments of its own. The authors urge the need to draw public attention to the plight of mobile pastoralists, while simultaneously pressuring governments and their international partners to protect the human rights of all. Back cover 9/11 HUMAN REMAINS Construction workers remove a manhole cover along a service road at Ground Zero in a renewed search for human remains in 2006. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the human remains of 41% of the victims have yet to be identified. Many remains were lost when the wreckage of the World Trade Center was brought to the Fresh Kills Landfill, a vast waste dump operated by the City of New York on Staten Island. In the rushed clean‐up effort, some of the cremated remains were eventually recombined with waste and some portions were even used as fill for road construction. Through the years, human remains have continued to be recovered from around Manhattan and at Fresh Kills. Today, more than 9,000 fragments of unidentified remains are in temporary premises controlled by the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). These unidentified remains are slated to be soon transferred to an OCME facility within the National September 11 Memorial and Museum complex. Four grassroots 9/11 family advocacy groups oppose this latest move, arguing over issues of access to the remains, and what they see as a lack of open and ongoing consultation with them. In this issue, Chip Colwell‐Chanthaphonh looks at the gap between the shared heritage of 9/11 as a collective memory and the individual claims of American citizens to care for their deceased kin, to which Alice M. Greenwald, Director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum complex 9/11, replies.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 3. June 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 3 Front cover AFRICAN ART This slightly larger than life‐size terracotta head (height 35 cm.) was found face down below some 4 metres of deposit in a tributary of the Nok valley, Rafin Dinya, in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Estimated age is mid first millennium BC. This image was published by Bernard Fagg, archaeologist and museum curator, in Man (old series) vol. 56, July 1956, p.89. Bernard Fagg (1915–1987), William's younger brother, was the first to identify the Nok culture in 1943. He established the Jos Museum in 1952 in Jos, Nigeria. (Collection: National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria). In this issue, Jonathan Benthall assesses Bill Fagg's legacy in the African art scene. Back cover SAKHA CARTOON HEROES In the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), northeast Siberia, activists from the Sakha nationalist intelligentsia are making strenuous efforts to revive their peoples' epic tradition, the Olongkho. Olongkho recitals undergirded this indigenous Siberian community's position within a complex and shifting animist cosmos, incorporating ancestors, demons, area spirits and gods, until they petered out during the second half of the 20th century, under the influence of Soviet modernization. Bards would travel from homestead to homestead, drawing their audiences into improvised recitations that would continue through the night. Most Sakha people now are unable to understand the elaborate language these bards used. Teachers, politicians and academics are investing large amounts of time and money into a cultural form that brings little pleasure to its dutiful audiences. They are displaying much ingenuity in rendering the Olongkho palatable to young people, in particular – such as creating a cartoon version of a famous text. But why are they trying so hard? The answer lies in the reified notion of ethnicity that has become integrated into the reproduction of social differentiation through popular taste, throughout Russia. Specific understandings of ethnic identity and cultural production were promoted throughout the Soviet period, as part of the Soviet state's massive social engineering project. These notions recur in contemporary public spaces and performances: they are implicit in the statue pictured to the right of this text, which incorporates a Sakha epic hero into a monument to those killed in World War Two. They have borne fruit in a capacity to associate a particular moral stance and social standing with a taste for one's own ethnic cultural heritage. As analyzed by Eleanor Peers in this issue, it is this association that accords Putin's actions in the Crimea their power to legitimate and reinforce the current Russian state.