Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 6. Decemver 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 6 Front cover ANTHROPOLOGY IN CHINA China has its own anthropology ancestors, revered today well beyond the discipline. In this photograph, former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Gu Xiulian and former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng jointly unveil a statue built to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong, China's most celebrated anthropologist. Official sources declared that the statue was intended to highlight the academic achievements of this nationally celebrated anthropologist. The Wujiang Municipal Party Committee and the Wujiang municipal government also dedicated a ‘Cultural Garden’ to ‘further expand the popularity’ and ‘enhance the influence’ of Kaixiangong village, the village in which Fei did most of his fieldwork. The Culture Garden is made up of an Exhibition Hall of the History and Culture of the Village, built in memory of Fei Xiaotong's sister, Fei Dasheng, and the Fei Xiaotong Museum. The museum explores the anthropologist's extraordinary life, highlighting in particular Fei's 26 visits to Kaixiangong. However, many Kaixiangong residents, and some government officials, were not enamoured of the commemorative statue that was erected on 23 October 2010. In his official standing pose, Fei Xiaotong was deemed ‘too distant’, and unlikely to ‘find repose’. Wu Weishan who had carried out the original official commission (and whose 31‐foot statue of Confucius was inexplicably removed from Tiananmen Square earlier this year), then visited Kaixiangong village and consulted its residents, after which he sculpted free of charge what was generally felt to be a more fitting replacement. The new statue depicts Fei relaxed and smiling in an armchair, echoing the Chinese ‘big‐tummy Maitreya Buddha’. Villagers believe this statue to be a more apt tribute to Fei's memory, and have expressed the hope that it will bring happiness to their village. Back cover BACK TO ‘CIVILIZATION’? Civilization is the name of a successful series of computer games (more than nine million units sold globally: see http://www.civilization.com ). Over the past two decades, the games have become increasingly sophisticated, not only in terms of programming, but also with respect to the background history, sociology and economics. For example, irrigation can increase food production, and granaries enable surpluses to be stored and populations to increase. The moods of the citizens matter too: ‘If a city has more happy citizens than content ones, and no unhappy ones, the city will throw a celebration for the ruler called “We Love the King Day”, and economic benefits ensue.’ Featured civilizations range from the Aztecs to the Zulu. It is not known whether Sid Meier (‘the father of computer gaming’) and his fellow game designers have ever studied anthropology. Even if they had, it is unlikely, as Chris Hann points out in his editorial in this issue, that the concept of civilization would have figured prominently in their curriculum. Civilizational analysis is a lively subfield of sociology and has never really gone away in archaeology, but it largely disappeared from anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century. Hann discusses some of the reasons for this, and lends his support to recent efforts to revive anthropologists’ interest in the concept. For all its variation, Sid Meier's addictive gameplay exemplifies the fiercely competitive, often violent ethos of today's capitalist civilization. The aim of each game is to rule the world in the name of just one civilization. Hann sees affinities with recent popular books engaging with world history, which rely heavily on contemporary readers’ familiarity with IT. The big question is whether ‘killer apps’ (Niall Ferguson) and the rise of silicon intelligence at the expense of carbon (Ian Morris) will eventually eliminate civilizational pluralism.     

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.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 4. August 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 4 Front cover R.I.P. Paul the Octopus During the 2010 football World Cup, Paul the Octopus became a global celebrity on the back of his ability to correctly predict the outcome of upcoming matches eight times in a row. Paul's fans queued in long lines outside the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, hoping to catch a glimpse of the brainy cephalopod who knew the World Cup champions ahead of anyone else. Upon his death, they demanded that Paul be immortalized. And indeed, in January 2011, the first‐ever octopus memorial, a larger‐than‐life‐sized octopus sitting on top of a football which doubles as shrine for his ashes, was unveiled at the aquarium. Paul's worldwide fan following transcended the borders of footballing nations. Paul made appearances on devotional altars in cricket‐obsessed India, and in existentialist plays in the United States, a country where football that is actually played with the foot still cannot compete with the local ball‐throwing game of the same name. An American documentary* detailing Paul's meteoric rise to psychic stardom is to be released in the autumn. How do we explain the extraordinary enthusiasm for an octopus vulgaris named Paul? What was it about his uncanny knowledge of the outcome of upcoming matches that enthralled so many, whether they cared about football or not? And what was it that made Germans, proud inheritors of the so‐called Enlightenment, build a memorial to a divining cephalopod? Clearly the answers have to go beyond the love for the game and to the heart of the human condition. In this issue, Lucia Volk asks if a cephalopod really can show us what it is that makes us truly human. * The life and times of Paul the psychic octopus. Cinema Vertige, Merlin Entertainments Group & Smiley World Media. Director Alexandre O. Philippe, Producer/DoP Robert Muratore ( https://www.facebook.com/seerofseers ). Back cover In this issue, Michań, Murawski approaches the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw as a medium through which to track Poland's shifting attitude towards Russia, especially in the wake of the 2010 Smolensk plane crash that took the lives of the Polish president, his wife and top‐ranking state and military officials. The crash took place just a few kilometres from the site of the 1940 Katyń massacre, in which Stalin's NKVD shot dead thousands of Polish army officers. Pointing the finger at Russia, many Poles refer to the crash as ‘Katyń II’. The Palace itself has, as a symbol of Russian dominance in the region, always provoked a mixed reaction in Warsaw. Gifted to Poland by the USSR in 1955, it remains the tallest building in Poland and towers over the Warsaw skyline. Although now largely disassociated from its difficult past in the everyday, the Smolensk crash brought the building's traumatic provenance to the fore again. Poland's tense relations with Russia will figure prominently over the next six months as Poland awaits the outcome of a Polish report into the Smolensk air disaster, takes up the leadership of the EU, and holds its own national elections. How will Warsaw's inhabitants reconcile themselves to this large building so symbolic of a foreign occupation, as long as it is tarnished by its association with Russia and that country's role in Katyń and, by extension, Smolensk?     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 29, Number 2. April 2013

Front and back cover caption, volume 29 issue 2 Front cover Fracking and anthropology Detail of a coal seam gas field in southeast Queensland, Australia. Well pads, interspersed approximately every 700 metres, are connected by tracks. The environmental impact of unconventional gas extraction is clearly visible in this image, which shows the typical plurality of connected and potentially hydraulically fractured wells in coal seam gas fields. Supported by visions of energy self‐sufficiency and economic development, global unconventional gas production has increased significantly in the last few years to meet our insatiable demand for energy. However, the rapid incursion of unconventional gas fields into rural agricultural areas and human settlements has given rise to heated discussion and protests, not only in Australia but worldwide due to concerns about the perceived environmental impacts, risks to human health, and the industrialization of landscapes. In this issue, Kim de Rijke provides a preliminary overview of what anthropologists might focus on in the study of ‘fracking’. Back cover Writing development A pile of assorted development documents from international organizations active in Georgia. Development writing is a major activity not only among aid professionals, but also among experts within universities, human rights NGOs or think‐tanks. Some NGOs are financed by Western donors to report on issues such as democratic performance, corruption, domestic violence, conflict management and environmental protection. The material they produce need not have any direct link to particular project interventions, but is nevertheless legitimized through and marked by normative frameworks to facilitate such interventions. The bulk of these texts are circulated within the development community, but in some cases organizations might keep them unpublished as a knowledge‐base to capitalize on. The August 2008 war with Russia brought a number of new aid actors to Georgia and subsequently a massive production of texts covering everything from the causes of the war to the fall‐out, and practicalities concerning, for example, the rehabilitation and resettlement of refugees. Some of the documents that are being produced within development are based on empirical research and could almost pass as formal academic publications. But in general, development writing represents a separate genre with specific rules of engagement for specific audiences. The new anthropology of development is interested in knowledge production going on within the world of international aid which, among other things, can be accessed through texts such as these. In this issue Beppe Karlsson looks at the characteristics of writing in this genre.     

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 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 33, Number 6. December 2017

Cover caption, volume 33 issue 6 Front Cover Rescuing tradition from the rubbish, a Jewish man in Israel recovers discarded sacred books. This scene serves as a metaphor for the struggle to hold on to tradition in the modern nation state of Israel. The achievement of political sovereignty is thought to be a form of liberation. It is supposed to bring freedom to the subaltern nations who attain it. But can the modern state create the conditions in which a once persecuted minority can finally flourish? Ethnonational states are always exclusionary. Israel inflicts the conditions that European Jews once suffered onto Palestinians, who have been displaced, disinherited, walled off; and even when they are citizens, they are always second class. But what about those at the center of sovereign citizenship: ‘the people’ themselves? Hannah Arendt reminded us that Jews were never quite at home in Europe. They had to be exceptional to be accepted. They had to be Jews, but not be like Jews, relegating their identity to the private sphere: ‘men in the street and Jews in the synagogue’. But these forces of ‘emancipation’ did not make them citizens like all others. The story of modernity and secularism in Europe is also foundational to nationalism and claims of self‐determination elsewhere. The question is whether or not emancipation has been achieved through political self‐determination, and if so, what such emancipation looks like. Do the forces of assimilation end with political self‐determination? Can a once persecuted people finally be liberated? Who feels free to be Jewish in the modern state of Israel? Whose cultures flourish and whose Jewish traditions can be practised freely? Who finally feels at home? And who, among the sovereign citizens of the ethnonational state, still experience a sense of exile, reflected in the need to rescue traditional texts from being tossed out with the rubbish? Back Cover: MALAGASY JUDAISM Through a warren of alleys in densely packed Antananarivo, capital of the island nation of Madagascar, there is a gated compound. Beyond the gate is a metal door to the entrance of the house within the compound. Emblazoned on it are a seven‐branched menorah and the Hebrew letter ? (shin, for Shaddai, God). Down the corridor, to the left, is a door with Hebrew writing affixed to it; behind it is a prayer room. Instead of pews or chairs, there are rugs, as one might expect to see in a mosque. This is Madagascar's synagogue, in the home of Tubiyya, the self‐taught Malagasy hazzan (Hebrew: cantor). Tubiyya stands next to his wife Miriam and their children. As with the man pictured on the front cover of this issue, Tubiyya sports payos – long strands of hair, sidelocks, that ultra‐Orthodox Jewish men grow on the sides of their faces, to obey the Old Testament commandment from the book of Leviticus 19: 7: ‘Ye shall not round off the edge‐growth of your heads, neither shalt thou diminish the corner edge‐growth of thy beard’. Most observant Jewish men do not follow this particular commandment. In this sense, the Malagasy Tubiyya and the Ashkenazi Haredim in Jerusalem (see front cover) represent small but visible minorities within the greater Jewish world. But they are outliers – both globally and locally – in a deeper, theopolitical sense: both are anti‐Zionist Haredim, rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish State on religious grounds. The Messiah has not yet come to ‘ingather the exiles’. In the meantime, Israeli society is too secular for them. And yet, would the hawker on the front cover accept Tubiyya as a fellow Jew? Race and Jewish genealogy set them apart. This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY bookends antipodes of Jewry, where inclusion and exclusion are in constant tension.     

Alan Turing: Artificial intelligence as human self‐knowledge

This article explores the life and ideas of Alan Turing (1912–1954), commonly known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), and highlights the process whereby the human self is reconceptualized in the development of Turing's ideas of machine intelligence. I will further illustrate how this process of self‐reconceptualization – composed of the pursuit, adaptation and transformation of self‐knowledge – is closely related to contemporary digital life. In doing so, I wish to reveal the ways in which Turing's underlying self‐transforming agenda of AI can contribute to our understanding of the human self, for AI, as I will argue, leads to questions of existence and existential anxieties.     

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 34, Number 4. August 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 4 Front Cover: INNOVATION IN A MEXICAN VILLAGE When Mexico's largest telecom companies refused to provide mobile phone service to the remote Zapotec mountain village of Talea de Castro, Oaxaca, residents responded with astonishing creativity: in March 2013, they built the world's first autonomous mobile phone network. The community‐owned network uses open‐source software to link mobile phones globally over the Internet using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It was developed in collaboration with a non‐profit organization, hackers and sympathetic activists committed to the idea of mobile access as a human right. Centuries‐old practices, including tequio (communal work party) and the asamblea (citizens' ‘assembly’ or town hall meeting), played a central role in enabling Zapotec citizens to give life to the network. Today residents of nearly 20 Zapotec, Mixtec and Mixe villages throughout Oaxaca can send and receive calls and texts within their communities for free, while long‐distance and international calls cost a small fraction of what commercial companies charge throughout the country. The network has provided villagers with an affordable and reliable system for maintaining family relationships and cultural continuity across national borders. However, Talea de Castro's community‐owned network is now under threat because Movistar, a giant telecom corporation based in Spain, has aggressively moved into the community. The case of Talea de Castro raises important questions about the roots of innovation, creative problem‐solving and the existential threats facing autonomous technological systems. Image source: DANIELA PARRA/REDES AC Back Cover: NORTH KOREA North Korean students against the backdrop of a statue of Kim Il‐sung (1912–1994) in Mansudae, central Pyongyang, 2007. Kim was the founding leader of North Korea and commanded the country's People's Army during the Korean War (1950–1953). For a decade after the war, his charismatic leadership contributed to turning the war‐torn society into a strong industrial economy. The importance of the last legacy is strongly propagated by the country's current leadership. In his guest editorial in this issue, Heonik Kwon considers the possibilities of a rapprochment between North Korea and the USA. Image source: (STEPHAN) / CC BY‐SA 2.0C     

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 6. December 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 6 Front cover THE HOUSE GUN The world was watching when Paralympic gold medallist Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp's parents stepped into the magisterial Palace of Justice in Pretoria. At that moment they entered alien territory beyond the ken of the insular white upper class Afrikaner community, many of whom live as if poor blacks were not the very foundation and backbone of the nation. Little had changed for them except their increased fears of criminal assault by black ‘intruders’ washed up from the surrounding townships. The only defence for their beleaguered class was a latter‐day version of the Afrikaaner laager: the gated community, motion sensors, armed guards, and a private arsenal of guns – from high powered rifles to the trusty little ‘weekend special’, the house gun. Face to face with a stern and stoical Zulu judge, Thokozile Masipa, the defendant sobbed, retched, and begged for mercy from ‘My Lady’. He admitted killing his live‐in girlfriend by shooting wildly through the door of a tiny toilet cubicle, arguing that it was a mistake. As Nancy Scheper‐Hughes argues in this issue, one way of understanding the Pistorius case is through the powerful writings of white South African authors such as Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer's anticipatory post‐apartheid novel, The house gun, in which she imagined a scenario similar to the one played out in the Pistorius trial where white fears and black justice met in the courtroom. South Africa is not unique. The mobilization of white peoples' fear of black or brown ‘intruders’ has infected other divided nations, like the United States and Israel. Here the social and architectural construction of ‘white’ settler or settler‐like special enclosures fortified by the legal right to self‐defence with private weapons has reproduced a colonial ‘paranoid ethos’ and a dangerous denial of the violence that is nested like a coiled rattlesnake from within their own segregated and hypervigilant enclosures. Back cover EATING PETS? An eating place offering dog meat for sale at a market; a common sight in South Korea. Seoul's largest cat and dog meat market opens on calendar days ending with 4 and 9 of each month. Here, on these days, ready‐cooked dog meat is also widely served all year round. One row of market stalls is entirely dedicated to shops selling mainly live dogs and chickens, animals consumed as part of a belief system that maintains that their consumption helps to regulate body temperature especially during the summer. As evidenced in the recent horsemeat controversy, British food anxieties revolve especially around maintaining a clear separation between companion animals and livestock. The Korean case, however, shows vernacular sensibilities running along different lines, principally based on local ideas about medicine and cosmology. Korean activists are presently taking a moral stance against dog meat consumers capable of tenderizing live animals for their meat. Yet even these activists voice their stance largely through emic interpretations of trans‐species relations rooted in Korean cosmology and ontology. In this issue, Julien Dugnoille looks at how Korean activists bring the issue of animal welfare to the attention of Korean society. He explores the ways in which activists deploy rescue narratives in order to attract families willing to adopt rescued animals, thus transforming people's perception of livestock animals into that of potential lifetime companions. Combined here are the Confucian virtue of impartial benevolence and 18th‐century Western moral philosophy.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 30, Number 1. February 2014

Front and back cover caption, volume 30 issue 1 Front cover POO WARS Mandisa Feni of Site C, Khayelitsha sits on a portable toilet on the steps the provincial legislature. She is one of the many poo protesters who, in June 2013, dragged containers of human waste from the shanty towns on the urban margins to the provincial legislature in Cape Town's city centre. By collecting this shit from the urban periphery and dumping it at the centre of provincial political power, the protesters powerfully enacted their refusal to accept the portable toilets that the authorities had provided for people living in these informal settlements. Rather than accepting what they regarded as second‐class ‘portaloos’ for second‐class citizens, they demanded modern, permanent, porcelain toilets, just like those in middle class homes in Cape Town. Similar to the case of the Great Stink of London of 1858, the politically powerful could not ignore the stench aroound Parliament. In his editorial in this issue, Steven Robins argues that a lack of in‐house, ‘modern’ toilets in shanty towns continues to plague its inhabitants, who have taken to imaginative protest in various ways. His study on the politics of shit in Cape Town represents a form of public anthropology on a largely private activity. This politics of human waste is not popular in the mainstream media and is considered to be irrational and unruly by the wider public. But, as developments in Cape Town show, when human waste becomes matter out of place, it can also become a potent substance when deployed in popular protest. Back cover FACE VALUES Villagers in Kanga, northern Mafia Island, Tanzania, watch a screening of part of the BBC/RAI series Face values (1978) in 1985. The film (at that time on a reel‐to‐reel system) was projected onto the white‐washed wall of the village dispensary. Prince Charles, shown here on screen, was Patron of the RAI at the time and had studied anthropology at Cambridge. He encouraged the making of this series and acted as the interviewer of the five anthropologists involved. It was argued by the RAI that the presence of royalty would ensure a large TV audience for the series in the UK, and indeed, this seemed to be the case judging by the BBC's audience figures. However, the series was much criticized both by the newsprint media critics and by anthropologists. In this issue, in the second part of her article, Pat Caplan considers why the making of ‘educational’ material for a mass audience about people and societies in other parts of the world is problematic and probably rather unlikely to achieve the aims set out by the Prince: ‘If more people could have the advantage of information and knowledge about other people's behaviour, customs, religion and so forth, then perhaps some of the prejudice against immigrants in UK could be slowly reduced’. It also considers how local people have viewed this film material and how and why their reactions have changed over time.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 24, Number 2. April 2008

Front cover and back cover caption, volume 24 issue 2 Front cover Front cover: Front cover The front cover of this issue illustrates Peter Loizois' article on the work of filmmaker Robert Gardner. The Hamar woman in the photo bears marks of whipping, a subject which raised the first divisions between Gardner and anthropologists Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, as Gardner was inclined to see the practice as a facet of female subordination and male cruelty. The Streckers, after many years of research, took a different view, which can be grasped in Jean Lydall's article ‘Beating around the bush’ (see http://www.uni-mainz.de/organisationen/SORC/fileadmin/texte/lydall/Beating ) Gardner makes clear his feelings in this note, highlighted in his book The impulse to preserve: ‘Editing the Rivers of sand imagery made a huge impression on me. I kept being reminded that I especially disliked Hamar man and I don't think I would have felt differently had there been no Women's Movement. I don't see how anyone can escape feeling the same way once they see the film. It was a painful life for both sexes. So why not say so? I don't think anthropology is doing its job by being value free. I do think it should accept responsibility to look for larger truths.’ (Robert Gardner 2006, The impulse to preserve: Reflections of a filmmaker, New York: Other Press, p. 158) Back cover Back cover: UN DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The back cover illustrates Paul Oldham and Miriam Anne Frank's article in this issue on the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration sets the minimum international standards for the promotion and protection of indigenous peoples' rights. The display boards capture the historic moment on 13 September 2007, when UN member states overwhelmingly supported the adoption of the Declaration at the General Assembly's 61st session. Votes in favour of the Declaration are shown in green (143 + 1 not shown), abstentions in orange (11) and votes against in red (4). With the exception of Montenegro, whose vote in favour did not register on screen, absent or non-voting states are blank. Such overwhelming support within the General Assembly was by no means guaranteed — it was the outcome of lengthy and delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations. Expectations that the Declaration would be adopted in December 2006 were dashed when the African Group of countries blocked it, claiming that, despite 23 years of negotiations, more time was needed for consultation. In the ensuing period, Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, as co-sponsors of the Declaration, took the lead in negotiating an agreement with the African Group that they would support a Declaration with three main amendments, and would block other amendments or delays put forward by Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand. The co-sponsors then sought agreement to this amended Declaration from the Global Indigenous Peoples' Caucus, who engaged in their own worldwide consultation process with indigenous peoples' organizations. The outcome remained uncertain, however, until these giant screens in the UN General Assembly Hall finally flashed green, to spontaneous applause from the delegates and their supporters. Since anthropologists work with indigenous peoples worldwide, this historic vote raises the challenge of how they, individually and as a discipline, position themselves in relation to the new Declaration.     

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.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 27, Number 5. October 2011

Front and back cover caption, volume 27 issue 5 Front cover TERRORISM IN NORWAY At the Blue Stone Monument in the centre of Bergen, Norway's second city, a young couple mourns the 77 Norwegians killed by a right‐wing extremist in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011. A cut‐and‐paste manifesto published on the internet and sent to his contacts all over Europe revealed that mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik targeted government buildings in Oslo and the Labour Party youth camp at Utøya in an attempt to instigate a civil war in Europe, aimed at effacing the presence of Muslims in Norway and Europe. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his editorial in this issue, Norwegian social democrats were a target of Breivik's violent ire because he believed them to have paved the way for a Muslim ‘conquest’ of Europe. Also in this issue, Sindre Bangstad's account of media representations of Muslims in Norway points to a widespread sense among mainstream Norwegian media of a radical incompatibility between so‐called ‘Norwegian values’ and ‘Islamic values’, especially in the field of women's and gay rights. As Norwegians struggle with the aftermath of the terrible events of 22 July, these profoundly problematic exclusionary religious and ethnic categories may face a challenge from the other Norway, a place of compassion and solidarity in suffering. Back cover THE GREEK CRISIS Right, a poster satirically depicts Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou as the IMF's favourite employee. Under increasing pressure from international institutions – especially the IMF and the European Union (of which it is a member) – Greece has been experiencing an upsurge in street clashes between protesters and police, as well as acts of petty crime. At least since 2008, already rampant stereotypes about the Greeks have greedily fed on the images of unbridled violence. Greece was once so crime‐free that the national newspapers reported acts of pickpocketing in Athens; today, such a scenario seems the very stuff of nostalgic dreams. But does the current situation really mean, as the media repeatedly suggest, that Greece has become a violent country? In this issue, Michael Herzfeld – who was first tear gassed and then mugged in Athens in July – argues that such claims are a gross misrepresentation and indeed are part of the problem. Greece – which certainly has acted with financial insouciance in the past – has now become the punchbag for the more generic frustrations of its European partners and of international finance. In the resulting vicious circle, its financial woes threaten to drag the whole European Union into final collapse. Meanwhile, severe austerity measures and rising unemployment have provoked simmering unrest, while competition for jobs feeds anti‐immigrant resentment (especially as Greece has agreed not restrict the onward travel of undocumented migrants, thereby increasing their numbers). In the resultant stereotyping, Greece is treated as a naughty child. Its young people, many of them well‐educated and painfully aware of the corruption that has hitherto protected a privileged few, face a precarious employment environment. Under that pressure, Herzfeld argues, traditional forms of violence and ideas about reciprocal moral obligation now shape the debates that are agitating the country and the world. Anthropologists, he suggests, can help correct the often misleading media representations of what is happening and why.     

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 6. December 2019

Front and back cover caption, volume 35 issue 6 Front cover WAR TRAUMA IN CONTEXT Lost identity (2018), 50×70 cm, acrylic on canvas by Willarekezi. Rwandan Willy Karekezi's painting reflects on how forcibly displaced people imagine themselves in recollections of home and flight. Their memories become fractured, even unrecognizable, over time. This artwork is part of a collection that was shown in an exhibition called ‘When we return’, in Gulu, Uganda, during July and August 2019. It brought together research and visual outputs from Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artwork was an output of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Politics of Return Research Programme, curated by Kara Blackmore (an exhibition catalogue is available).¹ Based on the Politics of Return work, as well as long-term research supported by linked Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC) grants, in this issue, Torre et al. argue that the literature underlying the recently published World Health Organization's assessment of mental health in conflict settings is inadequate. It sets aside crucial evidence and promotes misleading responses to suffering. (1). https://issuu.com/lseflca/docs/new_por_catalogue_print_final_sept_2019-digital-is Back cover Detail from Three women on the lake (2018), 245×170 cm, collage on canvas by Kusa Kusa Maski Gael. The figure is located in a dream-like vision of the lake and mountain range between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a complex image, full of nuances and ambiguities, linked to the artist's own memories of flight from the Congo, as well as those of the conflict-affected people he worked with in Uganda. In this issue, Torre et al. warn that conceptualizing war trauma in terms of psychiatric pathologies promotes the symptoms that therapists and aid projects purport to address. Without due consideration for the specificities of lived experiences and cultural contexts, what is actually happening may be largely overlooked, with potentially harmful consequences.     

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.