Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 2. April 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 2 Front cover A simple, austere cross hangs on the St. Maria‐Magdalena church in the newly constructed Rieselfeld neighbourhood of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Completed in 2004, the building contains both a Protestant and a Catholic church, with moveable partition walls also allowing for the creation of a single ecumenical site when desired. Similarly, a diversity of associations, meanings, and histories are attributed to the symbol of the cross itself in different spaces and times. Its appearance on the wall of a multi‐ecumenical space highlights the theological connections between Protestant and Catholic Christianities; its location near the French‐German border calls attention to the doctrinal disputes and historical violence that have occurred between these two faiths. The significance of the cross – while often presumed to be self‐evident – is complex and ever shifting. Its connotations are produced through processes as diverse as the urban renewal project of the church of Maria‐Magdalena and juridical rulings on its display in public spaces. Recently, the European Court of Human Rights rejected a claim that crucifixes hanging in Italian classrooms were an affront to freedom of conscience and a parent's freedom to educate his or her children. As a symbol, the Court declared, the cross does not stand for Christianity alone, but also for ‘European heritage’. While today, signs associated with Islam are treated as a threat to public spaces in countries throughout Europe, anthropologists can explore how claims made about the cross produce it as a flexible sign connoting not only the story of the Passion, but also European history and secular tolerance. Back cover LEGENDARY HOMINOIDS Gregory Forth inspects what villagers in one part of western Flores describe as a burial mound marking the place where their ancestors interred a group of hominoids they killed in a violent confrontation. After receiving details of the mound and its history from Forth, in 2011 several Indonesian and Western palaeoanthropologists began exploring possibilities for excavating the site and hope to gain permission to begin digging in the near future. The 2003 discovery on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores of a small, physically primitive hominin interpreted as a new species, Homo floresiensis, came as a surprise to anthropology. Not only is the find extraordinarily recent in geological terms, but the hypothetical species bears a close resemblance to indigenous images of similarly diminutive, hominoid creatures reputedly encountered by local villagers in an even more recent historical era. The challenge posed by Homo floresiensis to our previous understanding of hominin (or ‘human’) evolution is well documented. But the unexpected find poses challenges for sociocultural anthropology as well. Searches for the physical remains of non‐sapiens hominins are typically motivated by prevailing palaeoanthropological theories and interpretations. However, contextual as well as physical peculiarities of the Flores hominin suggest that future investigations of the new species may be crucially informed by ethnographic evidence, the bulk of which was collected prior to, and independent of, the palaeoanthropological discovery.     

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 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 28, Number 6. December 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 6 Front cover LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE Most French towns have at least one street, avenue or square named after the Republic, in a tradition that dates back to the late 19th century. The Place de la République with its monumental statue is a familiar Parisian landmark, yet smaller towns would also adorn their squares, city halls and law courts with symbolic representations of the Republic, such as in this picture. A female allegory is taken to embody the values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Once brandished in the revolutionary struggle against the monarchy, against aristocratic and clerical privileges, these principles have retained their universal appeal. Liberté, égalité, fraternité are the common denominator that French politicians of all hues can agree on, apart from the far‐right Front National which is seen as standing outside this Republican consensus, as its policies would for instance openly deny equal treatment to residents with non‐European backgrounds. EU border policing practices show that the moral and political dilemmata epitomized in French politics have begun to affect the entire continent: How much freedom of movement are Europeans prepared to grant to those who want to partake in our relative wealth and freedom? What are the limits of liberty? How far do our feelings of fraternity extend in times of austerity? In this new Europe, with countries straining under unsustainable debt burdens, and seemingly less willing to share their remaining riches, discursive markers are shifting almost imperceptibly. Claims to freedom and equality may come from unexpected quarters, as Anne Friederike Delouis writes in her article on the French far‐right fringe. Back cover FORTRESS EUROPE Protesting asylum seekers and irregular migrants face police in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta, August 2010. The protest erupted amid migrants’ uncertainty over the length of time they were kept in the enclave before transfer to mainland Spain, enacted here in the protesters’‘shackling’ of each other in front of the cameras. Ceuta and its sister enclave Melilla have been key outposts in the EU's swiftly evolving border regime since 2005, when sub‐Saharan migrants launched what the media called a ‘massive assault’ on the territories’ perimeter fences. The ensuing crackdowns led to a displacement of routes towards the Canary Islands and an unprecedented naval operation in response. Still, migrants kept coming – across the Greek‐Turkish border in 2010 and to Italy in 2011. As a result, the EU is fast‐tracking a ‘European external border surveillance system’ involving further investments. For the border guards and defence contractors involved, clandestine migration has become big business. The high stakes in controlling migration stoke increasing tensions, however – as seen in Ceuta's 2010 protest and the desperate mass entry attempts across Melilla's high‐tech fence in 2012. As Ruben Andersson argues in this issue, such tensions highlight larger contradictions in the EU's border regime, which conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to the external border – while feeding on this very risk. An anthropological lens on this ‘game of risk’ reveals how the business of bordering Europe is a fraught enterprise in which border guards, defence contractors, migrants and smugglers are stuck in a feedback loop, generating ever stranger and more distressing sights at the southern frontiers of Europe.     

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 38, Number 1. February 2022

Front and back cover caption, volume 38 issue 1 QANON This QAnon supporter was part of the crowd of demonstrators at the Washington DC ‘Million MAGA March’ shortly after Trump's 2020 electoral defeat. This woman's sign alludes to ‘The Storm’, a millenarian denouement that, in the QAnon imagination, will see Trump and his supporters rounding up and arresting top Democrats so as to retake power. In this issue, McIntosh describes the verbal art with which the mysterious and oracular figure of ‘Q’ managed to enlist millions of enthusiasts through the Internet. Q specialized in cryptic messages and urged online followers to decode and interpret them. These exercises fostered the notion that supporters themselves were engaging in high-stakes interpretive work, and that a digital army of Q followers could see through fraudulent politicians and experts, ultimately garnering their own knowledge and expertise. At the same time, Q used the power of secrecy to impart the conviction that Q was connected to a new alt-right state waiting in the wings. McIntosh also argues that the alt-right — including but not limited to Q — have increasingly encouraged the idea that reality or truth may lie somewhere behind or beneath the unreliable sign vehicle. Communications from political enemies should be read with suspicion, while communications from Q and Trump alike should be decrypted for their underlying encoded meanings, particularly dark portents. This oracular semiotic ideology now thrives alongside conventional liberal understandings of rational political processes. MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Pagan shaman Gordon MacLellan, also known as Creeping Toad, is an environmental educator who helps people find their own stories in nature. Here, he is storytelling in Plas Power Woods, Wales, UK. Gordon's stories are inclusive to anyone who wants to listen without discrimination. In this issue, Susan Greenwood characterizes magical consciousness as a pan-human participatory and analogical mode of thought that underpins mythopoetic expressions ranging from the ancient narratives of the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Snake and the life-enhancing ecological stories of Gordon MacLellan to the alt-right conspiracy theories fostering racial hatred embraced by ‘shaman’ and QAnon supporter Jake Angeli, a central figure in the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. Stories and storytelling are the modus operandi of magical consciousness. Essentially amoral, magical consciousness engages the emotions and helps create meaningful patterns that encompass varieties of human expression cross-culturally. Magical consciousness manifests itself along a spectrum. It can sometimes lead to divisive actions fuelled by conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Analysis of magical consciousness may add a further dimension to the investigation of Western post-truth societies whereby the Enlightenment notion of reason and scientific facts — as the only locus of ‘truth’ — contrasts with ways of engaging with reality primarily through emotions and beliefs. A better understanding of magical consciousness may help build bridges between Western cultures and the world views of indigenous peoples. In replacing machine metaphors with metaphors drawn from nature, such understandings may help shape our future responses to our planet's ecological, economic and social crises.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 35, Number 1. February 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 1 Front cover FASCISM ON THE RISE? This picture features activists of the Polish National Radical Camp (ONR) who are about to start a celebratory march commemorating the anniversary of the movement's establishment back in 1934. The march's point of departure was the premises of the Gdansk shipyard – a place that became well known in 1980s due to a series of anti-regime protests by ‘Solidarity’ movement activists. The slogan above the gate reads: ‘Thank you for good work!’ (employees would see this slogan when leaving the premises, after their shift). The choice of place was far from coincidental. Polish mass media were quick to describe the anniversary as an attack on the memory of the Solidarity movement which, they emphasized, was the antithesis of fascism and which fought for liberalism. They also claimed that the march was a ‘reminiscence’ of September 1939 when Nazi Germany took over the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk). It is clear that the event was meant as a provocation and the organizers did not shy away from admitting it. Yet in his commemorative speech, the ONR leader referred explicitly to the events of 1980, reminding the gathered crowd that Solidarity fought for better work conditions, dignity and basic rights, and linked those arguments to a depiction of work conditions in the (present-day) neo-liberal system. He also emphasized that Solidarity brought about a revolution and that such a revolution is needed again today. His speech exemplifies well, a growing tendency for far-right movements to draw explicitly on socialist ideas and return to the idea of ‘the third way’, observable in Poland and beyond. The event was attended by activists from abroad, among them Forza Nuova activists and Polish economic migrants living in the UK and Ireland. In this issue, Agnieszka Pasieka considers what it is like to study the ‘unlikeable’ other. Several other contributions also discuss how anthropology might position itself in relation to the trend towards extreme right-wing politics worldwide. Back cover FIRE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM, BRAZIL Oil painting, undated and without the artist's signature, which used to belong to the National Museum, Brazil, until the recent fire destroyed it. Depicted is a Bororo boy, baptized as Guido, who was adopted at approximately seven years of age by D. Maria do Carmo de Mello Rego, a lady of fine education, wife of the governor of Mato Grosso. Without children and of relatively advanced age, the couple treated Guido as if he were their own son. D. Maria do Carmo made great efforts to win his affection, teaching him to read and introducing him to the arts. For four years, from 1888 to 1892, Guido lived with her and her husband, first in Mato Grosso, then in the city of Rio de Janeiro until he died on a nearby farm due to natural causes, possibly pneumonia. Donated by D. Maria do Carmo before his death, this painting became part of one of the oldest National Museum collections composed of about 400 Indian artefacts she had gathered from Mato Grosso (the majority of these of Bororo origin), including an album with drawings and watercolours made by Guido and carefully arranged by her. Not only this painting, but the entire collection of ethnographic pieces and the album of drawings and watercolours were unfortunately destroyed by the fire. In this issue, Gemma Aellah and Jessica Turner interview João Pacheco de Oliveira, professor of anthropology and curator of ethnographic collections at the National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 37, Number 1. February 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 1 ALGORITHMS & GOVERNANCE Detail from Myriad (Tulips) (2018), an installation by the artist and researcher Anna Ridler exhibited at AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre, London, UK (16 May-26 August 2019). Each photograph that Ridler took is carefully affixed and hand-labelled, forming a dataset of unique tulips that could also serve as a training set given to an algorithm from which to learn. It evokes, according to the author, the imperfect and arduous human labour behind machine learning ( http://annaridler.com/myriad-tulips ) Governance by algorithms often includes semi-automatized decisions such as which families obtain resources, which neighbours get policed, or if a person can be released on parole or receive state support. In ‘algorithmic governance’, it is not only the often-opaque algorithmic assemblage that informs decision-making and intervention, but, most importantly, the original dataset and model that are used to train machine learning systems. The accuracy and representativity of these data often mirror existing and past forms of structural discrimination and inequality - and create new ones. From these processes depend the prediction, production of knowledge, and ultimately the reality of the intervention. These systems, while undermining basic social rights, make it ever more difficult to legally challenge adverse decisions. In this issue, Maria Sapignoli offers some reflections on the possible effects that the ‘AI-turn’ of global governance has for human rights practices, particularly in the United Nations. She argues that, beyond the policy and crisis-intervention orientations of AI, we are witnessing the creation of new foundations for human belonging and being. Algorithmic interpretation and computational calculation contribute to the definition of the reality of intervention and to the institutional formation, inclusion and exclusion of ‘data-identities’. All this is taking place through the automatization of decision making in the context of the increased interdependence between private and public sectors. Back cover BARBERS AND COVID-19 On 24 March 2020, the Prime Minister of India announced a nationwide lockdown to arrest the coronavirus's spread. The photo shows Abbas, a member of the Barber caste in a village in the Ernad Taluk of South Malabar, for the first time reopening and cleaning his barbershop on 22 May 2020 after lockdown. Before the lockdown, excepting Tuesdays, Abbas would routinely open his barbershop at 9 in the morning and close at 11 at night. He used to earn nearly 1500 rupees a day. During the lockdown, his earnings stopped entirely for two months. All Barbers of South Malabar were required to close their shops and were not allowed on-site to clean or take any of their equipment. Barbershops were subject to severe restrictions even after lifting lockdown when he could no longer earn 500 rupees a day. In the initial months after the lockdown, Abbas found his regular customers reluctant to visit his shop. In this issue, Muhammed Haneefa argues that Barber misfortunes have been disproportionately affected during this epidemic by the systemic caste discrimination in this region. In South Malabar, 97 per cent of Barbers are compelled to follow endogamous marriage, which has weakened their resilience and has severely compounded their sense of doom, as all relatives work in the same barber trade with little or no employment opportunities elsewhere.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 1. February 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 1 Front cover 25th South East Asian Games The 2009 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Vientiane, the first to be hosted by Laos in the event's 50‐year history, was widely experienced by Laotians as an unprecedented moment of national success, reinforcing national symbols and materializing national memory and ideology. In this picture two fans play giant khene, a bamboo free‐reed musical instrument distinctive to Laos and the ethnically Lao areas of northeast Thailand. Traditionally played to accompany courtship and folk songs, the khene is today considered the national instrument, and at the Games it complemented an array of other national symbols on display. Scenes such as these typify the ways in which the SEA Games engendered collective sentiments that were popular, participatory and joyous, particularly among Lao youth. The Games had also bolstered power and authority of the regime. The shared joy of the Games that momentarily united Lao people from across the country soon faded into the everyday realities of one‐party authoritarian politics in Laos, where the state's resource‐extraction policies often set ‘national interests’ against those of existing resource users. These two sides of the SEA Games reflect the contested nature of collective sentiments and, in particular, emphasize how these are aroused through public symbols and assembly. In a rather different display of collective feeling on the back cover, students in London protest government policies that threaten to turn tertiary education into an elite activity affordable mainly by the rich. Back cover UNIVERSITY FUNDING CUTS: AUSTERITY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY The UK faces austerity in public spending to a degree not seen in a generation. The back‐cover image shows students in London demonstrating in October 2007 against the top‐up fees introduced in September 2006, which allowed universities to charge variable fees. Demonstrations intensified in the closing months of 2010, when it was announced that fees would increase by up to three times because of the government's withdrawal of the teaching block grant from the arts, humanities and social sciences in England. In protest, students occupied dozens of universities. What are the implications for higher education and, in particular, for anthropology? In this issue, Hugh Gusterson casts a withering eye over the American precedent, arguing that high fees degrade the educational experience, cause grade inflation, and force indebted students to seek the highest paying rather than the most worthwhile careers. Similar policies applied in England may result in a brain drain of both staff and students. Richard Fardon argues that the proposed changes combine the worst of American and British models: indebted students and over‐regulated, under‐funded universities. It is not even clear that this policy will save money. Like other small disciplines, anthropology will struggle to retain a critical mass of departments, and it will be vulnerable to rises in fees as postgraduate study costs come into line with those for undergraduate study. What might tertiary‐level anthropology look like a decade from now? The number of departments is likely to have been reduced, and with it, academic job opportunities. Student populations will tend to represent the extremes of wealth and poverty, for whom fee remission is being touted as a gesture to fairness. Up to 30 years of debt will act as a deterrent to students between these extremes. As budgets are squeezed, and working conditions deteriorate, the best staff may choose to work elsewhere. Rather than putting UK higher education on a firmer footing, current policy may be a nail in the coffin of one of the few remaining areas of UK excellence internationally.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 1. February 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 1 Front cover CHINESE DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE The front cover shows a Chinese foreman, a migrant worker from Anhui province, and two Ethiopian labourers, working on a ditch along a road under construction in southeastern Tigray, northern Ethiopia, 2 December 2011. China's engagement with Africa is based on ‘win‐win cooperation’, Chinese diplomats claim, and is therefore fundamentally different from Western initiatives on the African continent. However, the situation on the ground tells another story. In this issue, Miriam Driessen offers a glance at daily life on Chinese road building sites in Ethiopia, revealing the striking parallels between Chinese development activities in Ethiopia and Western aid. Central to these parallels is the profound discrepancy between the expectations of Chinese workers prior to migration and the much less rosy realities faced on the construction site. Convinced of the goodwill nature of their activities, Chinese migrants were puzzled by the apparent ingratitude of local Ethiopians, their lack of cooperation, and, worse, repeated attempts to sabotage the building work. In this regard, Chinese struggles with development assistance in Ethiopia strike a familiar chord when we consider the reception of Western aid projects in Africa and elsewhere. Not new is the hiatus between optimistic and sometimes presumptuous development narratives and the frustration that follows in the face of the realities on the ground. Chinese struggles with development assistance in Ethiopia prove, once again, that development aid projects often do not work out as anticipated, because abstract and simplistic development policies may fail to fit complex realities. Back cover UNDOCUMENTED, UNACCOMPANIED MINORS IN US CUSTODY A rescue from the Rio Grande River: US Customs and Border Protection provide assistance to unaccompanied children after they have crossed the border into the United States. Until recently, news stories on immigration have exposed the appalling conditions of adult immigration detention facilities and chronicled the massive enforcement machinery that has resulted in record numbers of deportations since 2008. However, they have largely ignored the plight of unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children who cross the border alone, are apprehended by immigration authorities, and land in federal custody. The frenzied media coverage of desperate young migrants crossing the border in the summer of 2014 has galvanized the public but also created powerful myths about who these children are, why they are coming to ‘El Norte’, and what we need to do with them after their apprehension. In this issue, Susan Terrio tells the story of the Central American and Mexican migrants who are driven from home by violence and deprivation and embark alone, risking their lives on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the US border, land in detention, and wage an uphill battle to obtain legal status. It sheds light on a shadowy juvenile detention system run by the US government that has escaped public scrutiny for years. It shows how the government got into the business of detaining children and what we can learn from this troubled history.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 39, Number 1. February 2023

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 1 MUTUALISM IN MONGOLIA The front cover of this special issue on mutualism depicts Amarjargal, a young herding woman in Mongolia, holding a newborn kid who is having trouble finding its mother within the herd. Spring in Mongolia is a busy time for herding families, as they assist with the birth and nursing of newborn herd animals under rapid fluctuations in temperature of + or − 20°C within a single day. Before the sheep and goat herd head out to graze on pasture, Amarjargal, who knows each animal individually, searches for the distinct characteristics of the missing nanny goat to match the mother with her young. Before the herd is moved out to nearby pastures, the lambs and kids feed from their mothers. This activity enables the herders to scan the herd to assess whether adults or young are showing any signs of illness. Those struggling and unable to keep up with the moving herd remain behind in the encampment. Weak adults are given extra nutritional feed, while weak newborns are taken inside the circular yurt (ger) to huddle together near the warmth of the central fire. If any have diarrhoea or intestinal worms, they are treated with medicinal plants from the surrounding mountainsides or with biomedicine purchased from the local veterinary clinic. This photograph captures the mutualistic relationship between herding families and their animals in Mongolia. Herding families put a lot of time and energy into nurturing their animals, especially during spring, which is then reciprocated by the nurturing of the family through dairy products and in the form of meat, allowing for the survival of both. The accompanying article highlights how human-animal mutualism also involves interconnections with a diversity of plants such as the pasque flower (yargui) in the surrounding ecology. DOG MUTUALISM In this photograph, we see a Bankhar puppy – a breed of dog unique to southern Siberia and Mongolia known for its thick, shaggy, dark coat and distinctive yellow eye patches – cautiously approaching Natasha Fijn, who has brought unfamiliar smells and objects to the herding encampment. Although Bankhar dogs are not typically used for herding, they are vital to mobile herding encampments. They are respected for their role in guarding against unwanted visitors, rustlers and predators and for their loyalty and dedication to protecting the herd and ensuring the safety of the human herders. Their eye patches are thought to serve as a deterrent to ward off predators like wolves and evil spirits. This moment illustrates the intimate and reciprocal nature of multispecies relations within the domestic sphere or domus. Adult herders do not treat their animals as coddled pets, but the close contact between them within the encampment is evident, whether it be while riding a horse, hand-milking a cow or coaxing a newborn lamb to feed from its mother. Animals like this Bankhar puppy serve as prime examples of social forms of mutualism. This reciprocal relationship, as seen in Mongolia, has existed for thousands of years, with humans providing daily food scraps and care, and dogs providing protection and loyalty in return. This photograph, therefore, captures a glimpse of the theme of this special issue: the enduring bond between humans and animals. It highlights how mutualism can involve the animal existing as a valuable member of the community rather than as a dominated and contained object.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 1. February 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 1 Front cover Greece‐German relations The Prussian goose‐step survives in Greek official ceremonies as part of the ‘traditional’ display by the famed Evzones, or presidential guards – a relic of the German‐derived monarchy and its militaristic traditions. It is combined here with a male costume popular in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially among Albanians and Greeks, and nowadays associated in popular imagination with the Greek War of Independence (1821–1833). German cultural influence still lingers in Greece, most visibly in the remnants of 19th‐century neoclassical architecture in Athens and other cities. The brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and Germany's role in Greece's current economic turmoil together represent another side of a tormented historical relationship between the two countries and their peoples. In an essay of which Part I appears in this issue, Michael Herzfeld argues that the mutual stereotyping by Greeks and Germans – a habit deeply rooted in these complex interactions – has become a major cause of Greece's difficulties, perpetuating its ‘crypto‐colonial’ status within the European Union. He suggests that the only possibility for escaping this destructive downward spiral is through a determined attempt to stop the stereotyping, and argues that anthropology could play an important role in that reversal of accumulated hurt and mutual distrust. Back cover FOOD POVERTY IN THE UK If, as Lévi‐Strauss suggested, food is bon à penser, how can an anthropologist interpret a lack of food in a highly developed society? Can an anthropological lens illuminate either the recent rise in food insecurity in the UK or the exponential growth of food banks? In this issue, Pat Caplan reflects on her current fieldwork on these topics in north London and west Wales. She focuses particularly on food banks, making use of interviews and participant observation with clients, trustees and volunteers, as well as local and national media reports. The author poses a series of questions: firstly, she considers who needs food aid and why, which involves a consideration of insecure employment and low wages, as well as changes to the benefit regime which have adversely impacted on food bank clients. Secondly, she discusses who provides food aid and how, by considering those giving to and running food banks and other types of organization, including their motivations for getting involved. Thirdly, she asks what kind of solution food aid offers to an apparently growing problem. Does this form of charity merely depoliticize the arguments? Finally and most importantly, she asks what this tells us about the society in which we live, about the state and its policies and the public discourse around such issues. She notes that there are many well‐honed anthropological concepts which can be brought to bear on these issues, including gifting and reciprocity, shame and stigma, entitlements and blame. Finally, a consideration of voluntarism raises important questions about rights and entitlement, including the state's compliance with the international covenants to which it has signed up.     

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 33, Number 1. February 2017

Front and back cover caption, volume 33 issue 1 Front cover COOPERATION & COMPETITION In May 2010, we paid a visit to our friend Aurora';s grandparents in Valea Mic? (Moldova). They greeted us and agreed to pose for this photo at the family house. Aurora presented them with a small gift and we were served sweet bread and pálinka (the traditional homemade spirit based on plums). They spoke with us in Romanian, but they also speak Csango, a Hungarian dialect used by most of the Catholic minority in this part of Moldova. They had lived through dramatic changes: having grown up in a peasant community, they were forced to become ‘agricultural workers’; during the Socialist regime, after which they became peasants again, harvesting part of their former lands. This vignette illustrates how, behind the cultural diversity that can be found in every corner of the world, some basic principles are pervasive: the norms of etiquette to welcome guests accompanied by the exchange of food and gifts. Such token exchanges are a common characteristic of humanity: the tendency to cooperate and initiate and maintain relations through reciprocity. In this issue, J.L. Molina et al. review how different disciplines respond to the question of why humans cooperate. While contributions from sister disciplines tend to explain cooperation as an adaptive response to competition, social anthropology studies cooperation and competition simultaneously through the basic mechanism of reciprocity, or deferred mutual exchanges. This mechanism is present in hunter‐gatherer societies, where generalized reciprocity dominates; in prestige economies, where valuables are exchanged in specific spheres or given away in agonistic institutions; and also in peasant communities, where cooperation and competition coexist but never at the cost of putting at risk the reproduction of the community itself. Back cover ZOMIA Daily scene of agricultural life in the highlands of the Sino‐Vietnamese borderlands. The village, San Sa Ho, is located in Sa Pa District, Lao Cai Province, Vietnam. In May 2010, adults and children – in this case belonging to Hmong Leng ethnicity (Miao‐Yao language family) – transplant rice shoots from nurseries into recently flooded paddy fields. The extended family joins forces for such periods of intensive farming, bartering labour along a balanced reciprocity model involving all levels of economic and ritual life. Rice is the staple crop, supplemented by maize, cassava, and a few vegetables. The limestone geology and rough landscape of western Sa Pa district is unforgiving and farmers have to work extremely hard for modest results. Cash crops are uncommon in this region, even if opium had been a mainstay until the state forbade its production and sale in the early 1990s. This important loss in cash income has hit local farmers very hard and is only partially compensated today by the cultivation and sale of black cardamom, illegal logging, and poachng of wildlife. Vietnam is still under a communist regime but the agrarian transition and the economic turn towards a market economy are now decades old and nearing completion in the crowded lowlands. However, in these remote mountains – which are part of James C. Scott's Zomia – its reach is slowed down by the cultural resistance of egalitarian societies and world views not entirely compatible with the capitalist model. In this issue, Jean Michaud looks at certain limitations in Scott's model.     

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 20 Number 1. February 2004

Back cover caption
CONFLICT IN NEPAL
This photomontage, taken from the cover of the journal Ekkaison Shatabdi ('The 21st Century'), issue 58, March 2002, shows the bodies of dead policemen in front of the destroyed palace of Mangalsen, Achham, in western Nepal. The ancient royal capital of the kingdom of Achham, now the headquarters of Achham district, was attacked on 17 February 2002 by Nepal's Maoist insurgents. The ensuing battle between the guerrillas and state security forces was one of the bloodiest in the eight-year-old civil conflict which began when the Maoists declared a 'people's war' in 1996. According to the Nepali Defence Ministry, 57 soldiers, 49 policemen, and five civilians were killed, and scores of Maoist rebels were also reported dead. Over 8000 people — Maoists, security personnel and civilians — have been killed since the conflict began, and an alarming rate of disappearances and other human rights violations committed by both the Maoists and the security forces makes Nepal one of the world's most rapidly escalating hotspots.
Anthropology Today extends recent focus on anthropology and terrorism, war and conflict with two articles looking at the situation in Nepal. Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (translated by David Gellner) considers the coincidence of regicide and Maoist rebellion by looking at the continuities between royal and Maoist symbolism. Judith Pettigrew, Sara Shneiderman and Ian Harper address the ethical issues of conducting ethnographic research in a country such as Nepal where violent conflict unexpectedly engulfs one's fieldsites and compels radical changes to fieldwork methodology.